Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:36, 12 January 2024

Revision as of 07:37, 12 January 2024

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[[File:Tableau Général des signes et groupes hieroglyphiques No 125 (color).jpg|thumb|right|Hieroglyphic and [[cuneiform]] spellings of the name of [[Xerxes I]] on the [[Caylus vase]], copied in ''Précis du système hiéroglyphique'']]

Over the next few months Champollion applied his hieroglyphic alphabet to many Egyptian inscriptions, identifying dozens of royal names and titles. During this period Champollion and the orientalist [[Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin]] examined the [[Caylus vase]], which bore a hieroglyphic cartouche as well as text in [[Persian cuneiform]]. Saint-Martin, based on the earlier work of [[Georg Friedrich Grotefend]], believed the cuneiform text to bear the name of [[Xerxes I]], a king of the [[Achaemenid Empire]] in the fifth century BC—beforeBC whose realm included Egypt. Champollion confirmed that the identifiable signs in the cartouche matched Xerxes's name, strengthening the evidence that phonetic hieroglyphs were used long before Greek rule in Egypt and supporting Saint-Martin's reading of the cuneiform text. This was a major step in the [[decipherment of cuneiform]].{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=72–74, 100–101}}

Around this time Champollion made a second breakthrough.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=148–149}} Although he counted about 860 hieroglyphic signs, a handful of those signs made up a large proportion of any given text. He also came upon a recent study of Chinese by [[Abel Rémusat]], which showed that even Chinese writing used phonetic characters extensively, and that its ideographic signs had to be combined into many [[Orthographic ligature|ligatures]] to form a full vocabulary. Few hieroglyphs seemed to be ligatures. And Champollion had identified the name of [[Antinous]], a non-royal Roman, written in hieroglyphs with no cartouche, next to characters that seemed to be ideographic. Phonetic signs were thus not limited to cartouches. To test his suspicions, Champollion compared hieroglyphic texts that seemed to contain the same content and noted discrepancies in spelling, which indicated the presence of homophones. He compared the resulting list of homophones with the table of phonetic signs from his work on the cartouches and found they matched.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=75–78}}{{refn|Hartleben said that according to an established "tradition" Champollion came to this realisation on his birthday, 23 December 1821. [[W. Andrew Robinson|Andrew Robinson]], author of a more recent biography, argues that this date is too early, given that the ''Lettre à M. Dacier'', written the following September, gives no indication that hieroglyphs were used phonetically outside the cartouches. Robinson suggests Champollion might instead have realised the extent of phoneticism in December 1822, when his work was more advanced.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=148–149}} [[Jed Z. Buchwald]] and Diance Greco Josefowicz argue that there is no sign in the primary documents that the breakthrough came earlier than March 1823.{{sfn|Buchwald|Josefowicz|2020|p=422}}|group="Note"}}