How
Champollion Deciphered Hieroglyphs
In 1822 French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion
(1790–1832) announced that he had deciphered hieroglyphs.
The ability to read hieroglyphs had disappeared by A.D.
395, after the Egyptians began to use the Greek alphabet and
after priests of the Egyptian religion were replaced by Christian
priests. Early Greek and Roman writers speculated that Egyptian
hieroglyphs conveyed mystical truths rather than the sounds
of a language, but Champollion used the Rosetta Stone and the
Philae Obelisk to demonstrate that Egyptian writing was in fact
phonetic.
The Rosetta Stone is a basalt stela
that was discovered by French soldiers in Egypt in 1799. Its
trilingual inscription repeats the same royal decree in Greek,
hieroglyphic, and demotic scripts. The Philae Obelisk, brought
to England by W. J. Bankes in 1819, similarly bears an inscription
in both Greek and in hieroglyphic. Today the Rosetta Stone and
the Philae Obelisk are both in the United Kingdom, at The British
Museum in London and the Kingston Lacy estate in Dorset, respectively.
The Greek inscription on the Rosetta Stone contained the name
of King Ptolemy, and the Greek inscription on the Philae Obelisk
contained the name of Queen Cleopatra. Champollion hypothesized
that the inscriptions in the oval frames, or cartouches,
on the Rosetta Stone and on the Philae Obelisk were hieroglyphic
writings of the royal names.
The hieroglyphs in the cartouche on the Rosetta Stone were arranged
as follows:
Using the Greek version as a pronunciation guide, Champollion
assigned the following phonetic values to the signs:
He followed the same procedure with Cleopatra’s name on
the Philae Obelisk.
Ptolemy’s name and Cleopatra’s name share four sounds:
“p,” “t,” “o,” and “l.”
By knowing the signs in Ptolemy’s name, Champollion could
predict where signs for the same sounds in Cleopatra’s
name would occur. Thus his reading of Cleopatra’s name
proved that his reading of Ptolemy’s name was correct.
The fact that the “t” sound was represented by different
signs in Ptolemy and Cleopatra’s names showed that the
same sound had more than one sign in hieroglyphs. This fact
further explained why there were 586 different Egyptian hieroglyphs,
but only 24 different consonantal sounds in the language.
After this initial discovery, Champollion deciphered the entire
hieroglyphic system. He first identified the hieroglyphic writing
of the names of all the Roman emperors who had ruled in Egypt.
Then, by comparing the words he could read in hieroglyphs to
words in Coptic, he began to build a hieroglyphic vocabulary.
Champollion’s work remains the basis of modern Egyptology.
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