page_title: Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts
section_title: Rosetta Stone
hierarchical_section_title: Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts / Identifying signs / Rosetta Stone
context_page_description: The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the Coptic alphabet was increasingly used in their place. Later generations' knowledge of the older scripts was based on the work of Greek and Roman authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas rather than sounds, and even that hieroglyphs were an esoteric, mystical script rather than a means of recording a spoken language. Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and early modern times acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.
context_section_description: When French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, Bonaparte brought with him a corps of scientists and scholars, generally known as the savants, to study the land and its ancient monuments. In July 1799, when French soldiers were rebuilding a Mamluk fort near the town of Rosetta that they had dubbed Fort Julien, Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard noticed that one of the stones from a demolished wall in the fort was covered with writing. It was an ancient Egyptian stela, divided into three registers of text, with its lower right corner and most of its upper register broken off. The stone was inscribed with three scripts: hieroglyphs in the top register, Greek at the bottom and an unidentified script in the middle. The text was a decree issued in 197 BC by Ptolemy V, granting favours to Egypt's priesthoods. The text ended by calling for copies of the decree to be inscribed "in sacred, and native, and Greek characters" and set up in Egypt's major temples. Upon reading this passage in the Greek inscription the French realised the stone was a parallel text, which could allow the Egyptian text to be deciphered based on its Greek translation. The savants eagerly sought other fragments of the stela as well as other texts in Greek and Egyptian. No further pieces of the stone were ever found, and the only other bilingual texts the savants discovered were largely illegible and useless for decipherment. The savants did make some progress with the stone itself. Jean-Joseph Marcel said the middle script was "cursive characters of the ancient Egyptian language", identical to others he had seen on papyrus scrolls. He and Louis Rémi Raige began comparing the text of this register with the Greek one, reasoning that the middle register would be more fruitful than the hieroglyphic text, most of which was missing. They guessed at the positions of proper names in the Demotic text, based on the position of those names in the Greek text, and managed to identify the p and t in the name of Ptolemy, but they made no further progress.
  The first copies of the stone's inscriptions were sent to France in 1800. In 1801 the French force in Egypt was besieged by the Ottoman Empire and the British and surrendered in the Capitulation of Alexandria. By its terms, the Rosetta Stone passed to the British. Upon the stone's arrival in Britain, the Society of Antiquaries of London made engravings of its text and sent them to academic institutions across Europe.
  Reports from Napoleon's expedition spurred a mania for ancient Egypt in Europe. Egypt was chaotic in the wake of the French and British withdrawal, but after Muhammad Ali took control of the country in 1805, European collectors descended on Egypt and carried away numerous antiquities, while artists copied others. No one knew these artefacts' historical context, but they contributed to the corpus of texts that scholars could compare when trying to decipher the writing systems.
caption: A reconstruction of the Rosetta Stone stela as it may have originally appeared, with all three registers intact