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Both hieroglyphic and demotic began to disappear in the third century AD.{{sfn|Loprieno|1995|p=26}} The temple-based priesthoods died out and [[Decline of ancient Egyptian religion|Egypt was gradually converted to Christianity]], and because [[Egyptian Christians]] wrote in the Greek-derived [[Coptic alphabet]], it came to supplant demotic. The [[Graffito of Esmet-Akhom|last hieroglyphic text]] was written by priests at the Temple of [[Isis]] at [[Philae]] in AD{{nbsp}}394, and the last known demotic text was inscribed there in AD{{nbsp}}452.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=26, 30–31}}
Most of history before the first millennium{{nbsp}}BC was recorded in Egyptian scripts or in [[cuneiform]], the writing system of [[Mesopotamia]]. With the loss of knowledge of both these scripts, the only records of the distant past were in limited and distorted sources.{{sfn|Griffith|1951|pp=38–39}} The major Egyptian example of such a source was ''[[
The [[Coptic language]], the last form of the Egyptian language, continued to be spoken by most Egyptians well after the [[Arab conquest of Egypt]] in AD{{nbsp}}642, but it gradually lost ground to [[Arabic language|Arabic]]. Coptic began to die out in the twelfth century, and thereafter it survived mainly as the [[liturgical language]] of the [[Coptic Church]].{{sfn|Hamilton|2006|pp=27–29, 195}}
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==Early efforts==
===Medieval Islamic world===
[[File:
Arab scholars were aware of the connection between Coptic and the ancient Egyptian language, and [[Coptic monks]] in Islamic times were sometimes believed to understand the ancient scripts.{{sfn|El-Daly|2005|p=66}} Several Arab scholars in the seventh through fourteenth centuries, including [[Jabir ibn Hayyan]] and [[Ayub ibn Maslama]], are said to have understood hieroglyphs,{{sfn|El-Daly|2005|pp=66–67}} although because their works on the subject have not survived these claims cannot be tested.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=51–52}} [[Dhul-Nun al-Misri]] and [[Ibn Wahshiyya]], in the ninth and tenth centuries, wrote treatises containing dozens of scripts known in the [[Islamic world]], including hieroglyphs, with tables listing their meanings. In the thirteenth or fourteenth century, [[Abu al-Qasim al-Iraqi]] copied an ancient Egyptian text and assigned phonetic values to several hieroglyphs.{{sfn|El-Daly|2005|pp=67–69}}
The Egyptologist Okasha El-Daly has argued that the tables of hieroglyphs in the works of Ibn Wahshiyya and Abu al-Qasim correctly identified the meaning of many of the signs.{{sfn|El-Daly|2005|p=72}} Other scholars have been sceptical of Ibn Wahshiyya's claims to understand the scripts he wrote about, and Tara Stephan, a scholar of the [[medieval Islamic world]], says El-Daly "vastly overemphasizes Ibn Waḥshiyya's accuracy".{{sfn|Stephan|2017|pp=
===Fifteenth through seventeenth centuries===
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In the same year de Sacy gave a copy of the stone's inscriptions to a former student of his, [[Johan David Åkerblad]], a Swedish diplomat and amateur linguist. Åkerblad had greater success, analysing the same sign-groups as de Sacy but identifying more signs correctly.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=47–51}} In his letters to de Sacy Åkerblad proposed an alphabet of 29 demotic signs, half of which were later proven correct, and based on his knowledge of Coptic identified several demotic words within the text.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=110}} De Sacy was sceptical of his results, and Åkerblad too gave up.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=47–51}} Despite attempts by other scholars, little further progress was made until more than a decade later, when [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]] entered the field.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=111}}
[[File:Thomas Young by Briggs.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Refer to caption|Portrait of [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]] in 1822, by [[Henry Perronet Briggs]]]]
Young was a British [[polymath]] whose fields of expertise included physics, medicine and linguistics. By the time he turned his attention to Egypt he was regarded as one of the foremost intellectuals of the day.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=111}} In 1814 he began corresponding with de Sacy about the Rosetta Stone, and after some months he produced what he called translations of the hieroglyphic and demotic texts of the stone. They were in fact attempts to break the texts down into groups of signs to find areas where the Egyptian text was most likely to closely match the Greek. This approach was of limited use because the three texts were not exact translations of each other.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=121–122}}{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=67}} Young spent months copying other Egyptian texts, which enabled him to see patterns in them that others missed.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=155–156}} Like Zoëga, he recognised that there were too few hieroglyphs for each to represent one word, and he suggested that words were composed of two or three hieroglyphs each.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=67}}
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===Mid-nineteenth century===
[[File:Grammaire Egyptienne by Jean Francois Champollion, 1836 - National Cryptologic Museum - DSC07733.JPG|thumb|right|alt=An open book|Champollion's ''[[Grammaire égyptienne]]'']]
[[File:Denkstroeme-heft16 beitraege richter 2.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Refer to caption|Portrait of [[Karl Richard Lepsius]] around 1850, by Alexander Alboth]]
Champollion-Figeac published his brother's [[Grammaire égyptienne|grammar of Egyptian]] and an accompanying dictionary in instalments from 1836 to 1843. Both were incomplete, especially the dictionary, which was confusingly organised and contained many conjectural translations.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=239–242}} These works' deficiencies reflected the incomplete state of understanding of Egyptian upon Champollion's death.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=175}} Champollion often went astray by overestimating the similarity between classical Egyptian and Coptic. As Griffith put it in 1922, "In reality Coptic is a remote derivative from ancient Egyptian, like French from Latin; in some cases, therefore, Champollion's provisional transcripts produced good Coptic words, while mostly they were more or less meaningless or impossible, and in transcribing phrases either Coptic syntax was hopelessly violated or the order of hieroglyphic words had to be inverted. This was all very baffling and misleading."{{sfn|Griffith|1951|p=45}} Champollion was also unaware that signs could spell two or three consonants as well as one. Instead he thought every phonetic sign represented one sound and each sound had a great many homophones. Thus the middle sign in the cartouches of Ramesses and Thutmose was biliteral, representing the consonant sequence ''ms'', but Champollion read it as ''m''. Neither had he struck upon the concept now known as a "phonetic complement": a uniliteral sign that was added at the end of a word, re-spelling a sound that had already been written out in a different way.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|p=243}}
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