Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts: Difference between revisions

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[[File:Portrait de Champollion Le Jeune par Madame de Rumilly cropped.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Refer to caption|[[Jean-François Champollion]] in 1823, holding his list of phonetic hieroglyphic signs. Portrait by {{ill|Victorine-Angélique-Amélie Rumilly|fr}}.]]

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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}}

Young noticed the similarities between hieroglyphic and demotic signs and concluded that the hieroglyphic signs had evolved into the demotic ones. If so, Young reasoned, demotic could not be a purely phonetic script but must also include ideographic signs that were derived from hieroglyphs; he wrote to de Sacy with this insight in 1815.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=67}}{{refn|Young and other scholars recognised that hieratic represented an intermediate stage between hieroglyphic and demotic, but its exact nature, and whether it should be regarded as a distinct script from demotic, remained disputed throughout the period in which Young and Champollion were working.{{sfn|Buchwald|Josefowicz|2020|pp=137, 237}}|group="Note"}} Although he hoped to find phonetic signs in the hieroglyphic script, he was thwarted by the wide variety of phonetic spellings the script used. He concluded that phonetic hieroglyphs did not exist—with a major exception.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=135, 141}} In his 1802 publication de Sacy had said hieroglyphs might function phonetically when writing foreign words.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=110}} In 1811 he suggested, after learning about a similar practice in Chinese writing,{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=66}} that a cartouche signified a word written phonetically—such as the name of a non-Egyptian ruler like Ptolemy.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=153–154}} Young applied these suggestions to the cartouches on the Rosetta Stone. Some were short, consisting of eight signs, while others contained those same signs followed by many more. Young guessed that the long cartouches contained the Egyptian form of the title given to Ptolemy in the Greek inscription: "living for ever, beloved of [the god] [[Ptah]]". Therefore, he concentrated on the first eight signs, which should correspond to the Greek form of the name, ''Ptolemaios''. Adopting some of the phonetic values proposed by Åkerblad, Young matched the eight hieroglyphs to their demotic equivalents and proposed that some signs represented several phonetic values while others stood for just one.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=159–161}} He then attempted to apply the results to a cartouche of Berenice, the name of a Ptolemaic queen, with less success, although he did identify a pair of hieroglyphs that marked the ending of a feminine name.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=153–154}} The result was a set of thirteen phonetic values for hieroglyphic and demotic signs. Six were correct, three partly correct, and four wrong.{{sfn|Robinson|2006|pp=159–161}}

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:1em auto;"

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The scholar who corrected the most fundamental faults in Champollion's work was [[Karl Richard Lepsius]], a Prussian philologist who began studying the Egyptian language using Champollion's grammar. He struck up a friendship with Rosellini and began corresponding with him about the language.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=198–199}} Lepsius's ''Lettre à M. le Professeur H. Rosellini sur l'Alphabet hiéroglyphique'', which he published in 1837, explained the functions of biliteral signs, triliteral signs and phonetic complements, although those terms had not yet been coined. It listed 30 uniliteral signs, compared with more than 200 in Champollion's system and 24 in the modern understanding of the hieroglyphic script.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=244–245}} Lepsius's letter greatly strengthened the case for Champollion's general approach to hieroglyphs while correcting its deficiencies, and it definitively moved the focus of Egyptology from decipherment to translation.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=199}} Champollion, Rosellini and Lepsius are often considered the founders of Egyptology; Young is sometimes included as well.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|p=243}}

Lepsius was one of a new generation of Egyptologists who emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=198}} [[Emmanuel de Rougé]], who began studying Egyptian in 1839, was the first person to translate a full-length ancient Egyptian text; he published the first translations of Egyptian literary texts in 1856. In the words of one of de Rougé's students, [[Gaston Maspero]], "de Rougé gave us the method which allowed us to utilise and bring to perfection the method of Champollion".{{sfn|Bierbrier|2012|p=476}} Other scholars concentrated on the lesser-known scripts. [[Heinrich Brugsch]] was the first since Young's death to advance the study of demotic, publishing a grammar of it in 1855.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=272–273}} [[Charles Wycliffe Goodwin]]'s essay "Hieratic Papyri", published in 1858,{{sfn|Bierbrier|2012|p=217}} was the first major contribution to that subject.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=268}} It emphasized that hieratic texts, not monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions, were the richest source for understanding the Egyptian language. Goodwin and his contemporary [[François Chabas]] greatly advanced the study of hieratic.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=268–269}}

In 1866 Lepsius discovered the [[Canopus Decree]], a parallel text like the Rosetta Stone whose inscriptions were all largely intact. The hieroglyphs could now be compared directly with their Greek translation, and the results proved the validity of Champollion's approach beyond reasonable doubt.{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|pp=41–42}} [[Samuel Birch (Egyptologist)|Samuel Birch]], the foremost figure in British Egyptology during the mid-nineteenth century, published the first extensive dictionary of Egyptian in 1867, and in the same year Brugsch published the first volume of his dictionary of both hieroglyphic and demotic.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=211, 273}} Brugsch's dictionary established the modern understanding of the sounds of the Egyptian language, which draws upon the phonology of Semitic languages as Hincks suggested.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|p=245}} Egyptologists have continued to refine their understanding of the language up to the present,{{sfn|Loprieno|1995|pp=8–9}}{{sfn|Allen|2014|p=11}} but by this time it was on firm ground.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=273}} Together with the decipherment of cuneiform in the same century, the decipherment of ancient Egyptian had opened the way for the study of the earliest stages of human history.{{sfn|Griffith|1951|pp=38–39}}

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Decipherment Of Hieroglyphic Writing}}

[[Category:Egyptian languages]]