Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts: Difference between revisions

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Hardly anyone attempted to decipher hieroglyphs for decades after Kircher's last works on the subject, although some contributed suggestions about the script that ultimately proved correct.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=98–99}} [[William Warburton]]'s religious treatise ''[[The Divine Legation of Moses]]'', published from 1738 to 1741, included a long digression on hieroglyphs and the evolution of writing. It argued that hieroglyphs were not invented to encode religious secrets but for practical purposes, like any other writing system, and that the phonetic Egyptian script mentioned by Clement of Alexandria was derived from them.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=48–49}} Warburton's approach, though purely theoretical,{{sfn|Iversen|1993|p=105}} created the framework for understanding hieroglyphs that would dominate scholarship for the rest of the century.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=53}}

Europeans' contact with Egypt increased during the eighteenth century. More of them visited the country and saw its ancient inscriptions firsthand,{{sfn|Thompson|2015a|p=75}} and as they collected antiquities, the number of texts available for study increased.{{sfn|Pope|1999|p=43}} [[:fr:{{ill|Jean-Pierre Rigord|Jean-Pierre Rigord]]fr}} became the first European to identify a non-hieroglyphic ancient Egyptian text in 1704, and [[Bernard de Montfaucon]] published a large collection of such texts in 1724.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=43–45}} [[Anne Claude de Caylus]] collected and published a large number of Egyptian inscriptions from 1752 to 1767, assisted by [[Jean-Jacques Barthélemy]]. Their work noted that non-hieroglyphic Egyptian scripts seemed to contain signs derived from hieroglyphs. Barthélemy also pointed out the oval rings, later to be known as [[cartouche]]s, that enclosed small groups of signs in many hieroglyphic texts, and in 1762 he suggested that cartouches contained the names of kings or gods. [[Carsten Niebuhr]], who visited Egypt in the 1760s, produced the first systematic, though incomplete, list of distinct hieroglyphic signs. He also pointed out the distinction between hieroglyphic text and the illustrations that accompanied it, whereas earlier scholars had confused the two.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=53–54}} [[Joseph de Guignes]], one of several scholars of the time who speculated that [[Chinese culture]] had some historical connection to ancient Egypt, believed [[Chinese writing]] was an offshoot of hieroglyphs. In 1785 he repeated Barthélémy's suggestion about cartouches, comparing it with a Chinese practice that set proper names apart from the surrounding text.{{sfn|Iversen|1993|pp=106–107}}

[[Georg Zoëga|Jørgen Zoëga]], the most knowledgeable scholar of Coptic in the late eighteenth century, made several insights about hieroglyphs in ''De origine et usu obeliscorum'' (1797), a compendium of knowledge about ancient Egypt. He catalogued hieroglyphic signs and concluded that there were too few distinct signs for each one to represent a single word, so to produce a full vocabulary they must have each had multiple meanings or changed meaning by combining with each other. He saw that the direction the signs faced indicated the direction in which a text was meant to be read, and he suggested that some signs were phonetic. Zoëga did not attempt to decipher the script, believing that doing so would require more evidence than was available in Europe at the time.{{sfn|Pope|1999|pp=57–59}}