Jean François Champollion

Work in progress

While a few Egyptian monuments like the obelisks in Rome were well-known, the Napoleonic Expedition (1798–1801) marked a seismic shift in understanding. The expedition’s scientists documented a staggering volume of inscriptions, copying temple walls and collecting artifacts that had remained obscured for millennias. This was the first time the monumental scale of Egyptian architecture was revealed to the West. It became clear that the pyramids were not merely isolated curiosities, but part of a sophisticated landscape of temples whose grandeur and complexity were unlike anything else in the world. Egyptology as we know it today was still not born, so most of the depictions of the scripts were rudimentary and often incorrectly copied. The findings were published in the following decades as part of Description de l’Égypte. It was the catalyst for Egyptomania, which swept across Europe, igniting the world's fascination with Egypt. This fascination was responsible for the subsequent decades of adventurers looting of monuments and the stealing of artifacts, but ultimately also for the establishing of Egyptology as a field of study.

However, its most important discovery was the Rosetta Stone that would revolutionize our understanding and knowledge of ancient Egypt. It contained a trilingual text in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek.

European scholars in Champollion's era were not working with a neat awareness of three clearly identified Egyptian scripts. The situation was much more confused. The knowledge about the hieroglyphs were from ancient references by authors in antiquity. Most scholars assumed that these three writing systems represented different languages. Some even believed that hieroglyphics were purely symbolic or mystical, rather than phonetic.

In the fifth century BC, Herodotus wrote in Histories 2.36 that

“The Greeks write and calculate from left to right; the Egyptians do the opposite; yet they say that their way of writing is towards the right, and the Greek way towards the left. They [the Egyptians] use two kinds of writing; one is called sacred (ἱρὰ, hira), the other common (δημοτικὰ, demotika)”

“In the education of their sons the priests teach them two kinds of writing, that which is called sacred (ἱερὰ, hiera) and that which is used in the more common (κοινοτέραν, koinoteran) instruction.”

and expanded upon it slightly in Bibliotheka 3.1.5:

“... for of the two kinds of writing which the Egyptians have, that which is known as popular (δημώδη, demodi) is learned by everyone, while that which is called sacred (ἱερὰ, hiera) is understood only by the priests of the Egyptians, who learn it from their fathers as one of the things which are not divulged.”

It is evident that there has been a failure to communicate accurate knowledge of the scripts. The precise cause of this failure is unclear, though it is likely to have resulted from a misunderstanding or misinterpretation:

We must now speak about the Ethiopian^sic writing which is called hieroglyphic among the Egyptians, in order that we may omit nothing in our discussion of their antiquities. Now it is found that the forms of their letters take the shape of animals of every kind, and of the members of the human body, and of implements and especially carpenters' tools; for their writing does not express the intended concept by means of syllables joined one to another, but by means of the significance of the objects which have been copied and by its figurative meaning which has been impressed upon the memory by practice. (Bibliotheka 3.4.1)

More than four centuries later, Ammian wrote about the hieroglyphs on obelisks in Res gestae, showing that true knowledge about the hieroglyphs was still available, although it was slowly slipping into obscurity.

Now the infinite carvings of characters called hieroglyphs, which we see cut into it on every side, have been made known by an ancient authority of primeval wisdom. For by engraving many kinds of birds and beasts, even of another world, in order that the memory of their achievements might the more widely reach generations of a subsequent age, they registered the vows of kings, either promised or performed. For not as nowadays, when a fixed and easy series of letters expresses whatever the mind of man may conceive, did the ancient Egyptian also write; but individual characters stood for individual nouns and verbs; and sometimes they meant whole phrases. (Res gestae XVII.4)

By the middle of the fifth century, when the last (mostly inaccurate) vestiges of knowledge were collected in Horapollo's Hieroglyphica, the Egyptian language was no longer understood. This meant that the ability to read and write hieroglyphs, together with hieratic and demotic, was completely lost. Knowledge about the hieroglyphs faded from memory during the Middle Ages, and when interest was revived during the Renaissance, scholars relied on faulty information from Greek and Roman sources. These sources portrayed Egyptian writing systems, particularly hieroglyphs, as mystical symbols rather than a way to record spoken language. This assumption made deciphering any attempts destined for failure. That changed in the mid-1600s, when the German scholar Athanasius Kircher made the first attempt to translate hieroglyphs, assuming that they were phonetic characters.

Deciphering the hieroglyphs

When the Rosetta Stone was uncovered in Egypt in 1799, it looked like decipherment was only a few steps away, as it contained a trilingual text in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. At the time, it was not understood that hieroglyphs, hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic represented distinct stages of the Egyptian language. Moreover, researchers were forced to rely on transcriptions of the ancient scripts that were of an extremely poor quality. Indeed, the majority of reproductions were not accurate representations of the original texts.

Several researchers contributed to the consolidation of information about the ancient Egyptian language and associated scripts throughout the course of the following 25 years. As noted above, according to the historians of antiquity there were two Egyptian scripts, hieratic and Demotic.

In 1821, the French scholar Jean-François Champollionhad an epiphany. He noticed that some of the texts thought to be Demotic were in fact written in a similar but different script. After extensive research he proved that it had to be hieratic, as it was similar to both hieroglyphs and Demotic, but distinct from both. Champollion's breakthrough came from a deeply philological and historical approach. He traced the evolutionary relationship between the three scripts, arguing they were not separate inventions but rather successive simplifications of a single parent system: Hieroglyphs → hieratic → Demotic.

Central to Champollion's breakthrough was his mastery of Coptic. He had studied it since childhood and had become fluent in what is the final stage of the Egyptian language, written using a Greek-derived alphabet. He realised that if Demotic is a simplified version of Hieroglyphs and Demotic uses the Egyptian language, and Coptic is a later version of the same language, then the sounds and words of Coptic are the sounds and words hiding inside the hieroglyphs. This discovery was a very important step in solving the mystery of hieroglyphs, as hieratic papyri would provide a secondary source for many texts from Egypt.

Champollion published his Summary of the hieroglyphic system in 1824 providing the key to reading hieroglyphs, and establishing beyond doubt that the hieroglyphs themselves were composed of both phonetic and ideographic elements. Over the next few decades scholars verified and improved on Champollion's system, finally revealing the exact nature of the hieroglyphs. The next generation of explorers and scholars understood and embraced the importance of accurately reproducing the ancient texts.

Egyptian hieroglyphs consist of three types of glyphs:

• Phonetic signs — including alphabetic characters.
• Logographic signs — representing a word, or part of a word; like how the % sign equals the word 'percent'.
• Determinative signs — placed at the end of logographic or phonetic words, narrowing down the meaning.

The titulary of the pharaohs were almost never reused, but created specifically for each king upon ascension.