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The Decipherment of the Rosetta Stone

Discovered by French soldiers in 1799, the Rosetta Stone is a granite-like slab that became the key to unlocking the mysteries of ancient Egypt. The stone is inscribed with a decree from 196 BC, but its true significance lies in its format. The same text is carved in three different scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the formal script of ancient monuments; Demotic, the common script of everyday life in ancient Egypt; and Ancient Greek, the language of the rulers at the time. Because Ancient Greek was well understood, scholars had a direct translation of the Egyptian text, a tool that would prove invaluable for deciphering the hieroglyphs, which had been unreadable for centuries.

The task of decipherment was a competitive and incremental process. An English scholar, Thomas Young, made early progress by correctly identifying that the oval shapes, or cartouches, in the hieroglyphic text contained the phonetic spellings of royal names, such as Ptolemy. However, the full breakthrough was achieved by a French linguist, Jean-François Champollion. In 1822, he deduced that the hieroglyphic system was not purely symbolic, as many had long believed, but a complex combination of phonetic signs (representing sounds) and ideographic signs (representing ideas or objects).

Champollion's success was largely due to his extensive knowledge of Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians, which is a direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. This knowledge allowed him to determine the phonetic values of many hieroglyphs. The decipherment of the Rosetta Stone was a monumental achievement in linguistics and archaeology. It opened up a direct window into 3,000 years of Egyptian history, religion, and culture that had previously been lost, effectively founding the modern field of Egyptology.