Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts: Difference between revisions

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When French forces under [[Napoleon Bonaparte]] [[French campaign in Egypt and Syria|invaded Egypt]] in 1798, Bonaparte brought with him a [[Commission des Sciences et des Arts|corps of scientists and scholars]], generally known as the ''savants'', to study the land and its ancient monuments.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=98–99}} In July 1799, when French soldiers were rebuilding a [[Mamluk Sultanate (Cairo)|Mamluk]] fort near the town of [[Rosetta]] that they had dubbed [[Fort Julien]], Lieutenant [[Pierre-François Bouchard]] noticed that one of the stones from a demolished wall in the fort was covered with writing. It was an ancient Egyptian [[stela]], divided into three registers of text, with its lower right corner and most of its upper register broken off. The stone was inscribed with three scripts: hieroglyphs in the top register, Greek at the bottom and an unidentified script in the middle.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=2–3}}{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|p=20}} The text was a [[Rosetta Stone decree|decree]] issued in 197{{nbsp}}BC by [[Ptolemy V]], granting favours to Egypt's priesthoods. The text ended by calling for copies of the decree to be inscribed "in sacred, and native, and Greek characters" and set up in Egypt's major [[Egyptian temple|temples]].{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|pp=29–30}} Upon reading this passage in the Greek inscription the French realised the stone was a [[parallel text]], which could allow the Egyptian text to be deciphered based on its Greek translation.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=4–5}} The savants eagerly sought other fragments of the stela as well as other texts in Greek and Egyptian. No further pieces of the stone were ever found, and the only other bilingual texts the savants discovered were largely illegible and useless for decipherment.{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|p=20}}{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=27–28}} The savants did make some progress with the stone itself. [[Jean-Joseph Marcel]] said the middle script was "cursive characters of the ancient Egyptian language", identical to others he had seen on papyrus scrolls. He and Louis Rémi Raige began comparing the text of this register with the Greek one, reasoning that the middle register would be more fruitful than the hieroglyphic text, most of which was missing. They guessed at the positions of proper names in the middle register, based on the position of those names in the Greek text, and managed to identify the ''p'' and ''t'' in the name of Ptolemy, but they made no further progress.{{sfn|Solé|Valbelle|2002|pp=9, 24–26}}

The first copies of the stone's inscriptions were sent to France in 1800. In 1801 the French forcearmy in Egypt was besieged by theBritish and [[Ottoman Empire|Ottoman]] and the Britishforces and surrendered in the [[Capitulation of Alexandria]]. By its terms, the Rosetta Stone passed to the British. Upon the stone's arrival in Britain, the [[Society of Antiquaries of London]] made engravings of its text and sent them to academic institutions across Europe.{{sfn|Parkinson|1999|pp=20–22}}

Reports from Napoleon's expedition spurred [[Egyptomania|a mania for ancient Egypt]] in Europe. Egypt was chaotic in the wake of the French and British withdrawal, but after [[Muhammad Ali of Egypt|Muhammad Ali]] took control of the country in 1805, European collectors descended on Egypt and carried away numerous antiquities, while artists copied others.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=108, 132–134}} No one knew these artefacts' historical context,{{sfn|Robinson|2012|p=11}} but they contributed to the corpus of texts that scholars could compare when trying to decipher the writing systems.{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|pp=119, 124}}