Another article described how the ability to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs was lost when they fell out of use and how the finding of the Rosetta Stone was essential to restoring that understanding.
On the Rosetta Stone are engraved three types of writing: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic (a cursive script derived from hieroglyphs), and ancient Greek. It was the presence of Greek that started scholars on the long journey of deciphering the hieroglyphs.
From Ancient Greek to Demotic to Hieroglyphs
As recounted by Carol Andrews in her book The British Museum Book of the Rosetta Stone, in 1802, Stephen Weston read the first English translation of the Greek portion of the Rosetta Stone to a gathering of the Society of Antiquaries in London, which was the slab’s first home away from Egypt. A Frenchman had already succeeded in making the first French translation of the Greek, based on ink impressions of the Rosetta Stone that had been presented as a gift to a French general.
Antoine Isaac Silvestre De Sacy of France was one of the first Europeans to try to decipher the Demotic text on the Rosetta Stone. According to some sources, in 1802 he was able to identify some Demotic versions of proper names that appear in the Greek portion of the stone.
Other sources credit Swedish diplomat Johan David Akerblad with identifying all of the proper names and a few other words in the Demotic text.However, Andrews claims in her book that both De Sacy and Akerblad mistakenly believed that all of the Demotic words were alphabetic.
In 1814, Thomas Young, an Englishman, finished translating the Demotic text, although this was later found to contain several errors based on incorrect guesses. He was the first to realize that the Demotic writing was based on the hieroglyphs.
Although Young began working on the hieroglyphs, he made little progress. Nevertheless, his careful methodology – analyzing each word on the stone and noting equivalences between words or phrases in the Greek and groups of hieroglyphs -- greatly influenced the approach taken by subsequent scholars who tackled the hieroglyphic translation. Young was able to decipher the words “and,” “king,” and “Egypt,” among a few others. He also worked out the numerical system used in the hieroglyphs. Young came to suspect that not all of the hieroglyphs were alphabetic representations.
From 1822 to 1824, French scholar Jean François Champollion expanded on Young’s work, and he is credited as being the main translator of the Rosetta Stone.
As reported by John Ray in his book The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt, Champollion could read Greek and Coptic, which was a form of Egyptian writing that adapted elements of Greek and hieroglyphs and that was used by the Christian descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Champollion figured out that a few Demotic signs were in Coptic. By seeing how those signs were used in Coptic, he worked out their meaning. He then connected the Demotic signs with the hieroglyphic symbols. Through this painstaking approach, Champollion worked out an alphabet to decipher the other hieroglyphs.
Finally, in 1858, the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania (now the oldest continually existing literary society in the United States) published the first complete English translation of the Rosetta Stone, as worked out by several undergraduate members.
What the Rosetta Stone Says
The writing on the Rosetta Stone is part of a proclamation by a council of priests who had assembled in Memphis on the first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V. In addition to referring to honors bestowed on the king by the temples of Egypt, the proclamation refers to privileges for the priests, including the restoration of a tax amnesty.
Some scholars believe that there are several as yet undiscovered copies of the Rosetta Stone because the proclamation must have been made at many temples throughout Egypt.
Sources:
The British Museum Book of the Rosetta Stone, by Carol Andrews (Peter Bedrick Books, 1981)
The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt, by John Ray (Harvard University Press, 2007)
"How Champollion Deciphered the Rosetta Stone," by Muriel Mirak Weissbach, Fidelio magazine, Fall 1999 (reprinted by the Schiller Institute)
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