The last securely dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved at Philae in the year 394. After that, for fourteen centuries, nobody on Earth could read Egyptian writing, and Egypt had been producing written records for more than three thousand years before that.
The script was not lost because it was complicated. It was lost because everyone was certain they already knew what kind of writing it was, and they were wrong.
The Mistake That Lasted 1,400 Years
The received view was that hieroglyphs were symbolic. Each sign stood for an idea, a mystical concept, a piece of priestly wisdom, encoded in pictures so that the profane could not read it.
This came from a late antique text, the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, which gives allegorical explanations for a long list of signs: the vulture means mother, the goose means son, and so on. Some of those are half right as logograms. Most are elaborate inventions.
In the seventeenth century the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher took that approach to its conclusion and published lengthy mystical translations of Egyptian inscriptions. They are entirely fictional. One short cartouche containing nothing more than a royal name he rendered as a paragraph about the benefits of the divine Osiris being procured by sacred ceremonies and the chain of the Genii.
The consequence was that for centuries scholars were looking for meanings when they should have been listening for sounds.
The Stone
In July 1799, French soldiers of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition were strengthening a fort near the town of Rosetta in the Nile delta and found a slab of granodiorite built into old masonry. An officer, Pierre François Bouchard, saw that it carried three blocks of different writing and reported it.
The stone is a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC by a council of priests, honouring the young king Ptolemy V and recording, among other things, tax concessions granted to the temples. As a document it is routine administrative and religious business. It is the most important object in Egyptology because of its format rather than its content.
It carries the same text three times: in hieroglyphs, in Demotic, which is a cursive Egyptian script used for everyday purposes, and in ancient Greek. That is two languages in three scripts, and the Greek was perfectly readable by any educated European.
The stone came to Britain in 1801 under the terms of the French surrender at Alexandria and has been in the British Museum since 1802. Copies circulated widely and quickly, which is why the work on it was done all over Europe.
What Thomas Young Got Right
The first real progress was made by Thomas Young, the physician and physicist whose double slit experiment had established the wave nature of light. He turned to the stone around 1814 and made several genuine advances.
He established that the oval rings, the cartouches, contained royal names, and that signs inside them were being used phonetically to spell foreign names such as Ptolemy. He worked out the direction of reading, which is towards the faces of the animal and human signs. He identified the correct values of a number of individual characters and demonstrated that Demotic and hieroglyphs were related forms of the same writing rather than separate systems.
Then he stopped short, and the reason he stopped is the interesting part. Young accepted that foreign names had to be spelled out phonetically, because Egyptian had no symbols for Greek kings. He continued to believe that native Egyptian words were written symbolically. So he treated phonetic spelling as a special mechanism for imported words, a workaround rather than the system.
What Champollion Had That Young Did Not
Jean François Champollion had been obsessed with Egypt since childhood and had prepared for it in the only way that could have worked: by learning languages. Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Persian, Ethiopic, Sanskrit.
And Coptic. That is the decisive one.
Coptic is the final stage of the Egyptian language, written in an alphabet derived from Greek, and it survived as the liturgical language of the Egyptian church. Champollion learned it thoroughly, to the point of writing his diary in it, and he said openly that he wanted to think in Coptic.
This gave him something nobody working purely on the script possessed: the actual language underneath. If you can decide that a sequence of signs ought to spell a word meaning to give birth, and you know that the Coptic word for it is mise, you have a check on your guesses that no amount of ingenuity can substitute for.
14 September 1822
The break came from copies of inscriptions from Abu Simbel, which contained cartouches of pharaohs who had reigned long before any Greek or Roman ruled Egypt.
One cartouche began with a circle. In Coptic the word for sun is re. If the circle were a phonetic sign, it would give the sound ra or re. The next signs, which he could already read from his work on the Greek names, gave m and s, doubled. Ra, mes, ses.
Ramesses. A king’s name, written phonetically, in a native Egyptian inscription, meaning something intelligible in Coptic: Ra has fashioned him.
He repeated it with another cartouche and got Thutmose, which works the same way.
That destroyed the last version of the old assumption. Phonetic writing was not a special trick for foreign names. It was how the script worked.
He ran from his desk to his brother’s office, said that he had got it, and then collapsed and spent several days in bed, apparently unable to do anything.
On 27 September 1822 he read his conclusions to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Paris, in the paper known as the Lettre à M. Dacier. Thomas Young was in the audience.
What the System Turned Out to Be
The reason it had resisted for so long is that hieroglyphic writing is not one kind of system but three working at once.
- Phonograms, signs standing for sounds. Mostly consonants, since Egyptian writing does not normally record vowels, and a sign can represent one, two or three consonants
- Logograms, signs standing for whole words, which is what the old symbolic theory was seeing
- Determinatives, signs added at the end of a word that are not pronounced at all and tell you what category the word belongs to: a pair of legs after a verb of motion, a seated man after a word for a person, a scroll after an abstract noun
The determinatives are why the script looks like pictures telling a story when it is not. And because vowels are unwritten and the same consonant skeleton can mean several things, the determinatives are doing genuine work: they disambiguate.
Anyone insisting that the signs must be either pictures or letters was going to fail, because they are both, in the same line, sometimes in the same word.
The Quarrel
The priority dispute began at once and has never really stopped. Young felt his contribution had been used without proper acknowledgement, and he had a case: the identification of the cartouches, the reading direction and several sign values were his.
Champollion’s supporters replied that identifying a few signs is not the same as reading a language, and that the mixed system, the grammar and the actual translation of texts were his.
Both are right, and the balance is clear enough. Young found that some signs were phonetic. Champollion found that the writing was Egyptian, and then read it, published a grammar and a dictionary, and founded a discipline. The dispute was made worse by the fact that Britain and France had recently been at war over the country the stone came from and the stone itself was in London.
Champollion went to Egypt in 1828, spent eighteen months copying and reading inscriptions in situ, and came back with his conclusions confirmed by monuments rather than by copies. He became curator of Egyptian collections at the Louvre and died in 1832 at forty one, of a stroke, with the grammar unfinished. His brother published it.
What Was Recovered
The scale of it is easy to understate. Before 1822, ancient Egypt was known almost entirely from what Greeks and Romans had written about it, plus monuments nobody could read. After 1822 there were letters, contracts, medical papyri, tax records, poetry, school exercises, complaints about working conditions at Deir el Medina, and three thousand years of a civilisation’s own account of itself.
It is the largest single recovery of lost information in the history of scholarship, and the two comparable cases are both about objects rather than languages: the Archimedes palimpsest, where a mathematical text was scraped off and overwritten and then read again with modern imaging, and the Antikythera mechanism, where a corroded lump from a shipwreck turned out to be a geared model of the heavens.
In all three, the object had been sitting in plain sight for a long time, and what unlocked it was somebody arriving with the right tool and the willingness to abandon the assumption everybody else was keeping.
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