When was hieroglyphics deciphered

The stone depicted inscriptions of demotic and Greek hieroglyphic texts. The stone was called the Rosetta Stone because it was discovered in the city of Rosetta, which lies on the mouth of the Nile branch in the Mediterranean. It is a royal decree issued in the city of Memphis by priests to Ptolemy V. Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion was able to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs through the oval shapes found in the hieroglyphic text, which are known as Kharratis and include the names of kings and queens.

It was coined by French soldiers in Egypt with Napoleon, because the oval rings reminded them of the shape of their gun cartridges. Demotic script was derived from the far more ancient hieroglyphic script and used from about BC. The standard script by the time of the Rosetta Stone, it is a cursive script with joined-up letters, suitable for handwriting, unlike the monumental hieroglyphic. Pictograms are semantic signs that are pictorial in origin — think of the signs on toilet doors.

However, pictograms can become unrecognisable over time, as in demotic. Greek and Roman authors generally credited Egypt with the invention of writing, as a gift from the gods. They dismissed any phonetic component in the hieroglyphs, and claimed that they were conceptual or symbolic signs. Thus, a hieroglyphic pictogram of a hawk was said to represent the concept of swiftness, a pictogram of a crocodile to symbolise all that was evil.

In , William Warburton, the future bishop of Gloucester, suggested that the origin of all writing might have been pictorial, rather than divine. Fortunately for science, this force was almost as interested in knowledge as in conquest. When military engineers discovered the Rosetta Stone in July while rebuilding an old fort in the Nile Delta, the officer in charge quickly recognised the importance of its three parallel inscriptions and sent the Stone to the savants in Cairo.

Thus, here is a means of acquiring certain information of this, until now, unintelligible language. From the moment of discovery, it was clear that the bottom inscription on the Rosetta Stone was written in the Greek alphabet and the top one — unfortunately the most damaged — was in Egyptian hieroglyphs with visible cartouches. Although Coptic, the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, had ceased to be a living language, it still existed in a fossilised form in the liturgy of the Christian Coptic Church.

Champollion had learnt Coptic as a teenager, and was so fluent that he used it to record entries in his journal. However, he had not previously considered that Coptic might also be the language of hieroglyphs. Champollion wondered if the first hieroglyph in the cartouche, the disc, might represent the sun, and then he assumed its sound value to be that of the Coptic word for sun, 'ra'. This gave him the sequence 'ra-?

Only one pharaonic name seemed to fit. Allowing for the omission of vowels and the unknown letter, surely this was Rameses. The spell was broken. Hieroglyphs were phonetic and the underlying language was Egyptian. Champollion dashed into his brother's office where he proclaimed 'Je tiens l'affaire! He was bedridden for the next five days. It showed that the scribes sometimes exploited the rebus principle, which involves breaking long words into phonetic components, and then using pictures to represent these components.

For example, the word belief can be broken down into two syllables, 'bee-leaf'. Hence, instead of writing the word alphabetically, it could be represented by the image of a bee and a leaf. In the Rameses example, only the first syllable 'ra' is represented by a rebus image, a picture of the sun, while the remainder of the word is spelt more conventionally.

The significance of the sun in the Rameses cartouche is enormous, because it indicates the language of the scribes. They could not have spoken English, because this would mean that the cartouche would be pronounced 'Sun-meses'.

Similarly, they could not have spoken French, because then the cartouche would be pronounced 'Soleil-meses'. The cartouche only makes sense if the scribes spoke Coptic, because it would then be pronounced 'Ra-meses'. Champollion went on to show that for most of their writing, the scribes relied on using a relatively conventional phonetic alphabet.

Indeed, Champollion called phonetics the 'soul' of hieroglyphics. Using his deep knowledge of Coptic, Champollion began a prolific decipherment of hieroglyphs. Arab scholars had already recognized the connection between the ancient and later forms of Egyptian language [such as Coptic]," Maitland said.

While Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered in the 19th century, there are still a number of ancient languages that are not understood today. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing falls into the category of a case in which "the language is known, but not the script," said Allen. Put another way, scholars already knew the ancient Egyptian language from Coptic, but did not know what the hieroglyphic signs meant. Related: Is Latin a dead language? Another decipherment problem is where "the script is known, but not the language," Allen said.

In this case, we can read the words, but we don't know what they mean," Allen said.