Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:37, 12 January 2024

Revision as of 02:51, 26 January 2024

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[[File:RosettaStoneAsPartOfOriginalStele revised.svg|thumb|upright|alt=The Rosetta Stone with the missing upper and lower portions outlined|A reconstruction of the [[Rosetta Stone]] stela as it may have originally appeared, with all three registers intact]]

{{main|Rosetta Stone}}

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 [[Demoticdemotic (Egyptian)|demotic]] 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}}