Talk:Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts

message: The writing in this article needs to be improved.--76.203.125.247 18:09, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: old talk

message: We need to add reasons as to why decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphics were so important. This can be achieved by adding information of archaeological finds which were not understood until the full decipherment in 1820.
--LostOverThere (talk) 07:59, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why was Decipherment needed? 

message: Substantial portions of this article dating from 2006 are copied verbatim from http://www.andrewfanous.com/CopticCorner/CopticLanguage1.htm which carries a copyright date of 2003. 192.91.172.36 (talk) 01:43, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyvio 

message: Even if it's only a few sentences, I think it's a significant factor worth noting that the Catholic Church was threatened by Champolllion's expedition to Egypt due to the possibility that he might pre date some of the Hieroglyphs to the Great Flood( Noah's Ark).
If this happened it would discredit biblical history as everything was supposed to be destroyed by the Great Flood and no civilization was capable of surviving it, (supposedly). Supposedly, the church asked Champillion to censor his findings if he found any records that predated the flood and 
one of the conditions of his expedition, an ultimatum given to him by the French government, was that he abide by this condition. 
:The problem is I cannot find any sources at the moment except this documentary from the BBC; Egypt:Secrets of the Hieroglyphs which I saw on youtube. 
Actually, the church was a big fan of Napoleon, naming him a Defender of the Faith because of his decipherment of hieroglyphs believed to be present flanking the Dendera zodiac, which showed the zodiac to be Ptolemaic, not tens of thousands of years old as many were saying. (The translation proved to be based on an incorrect transcription, though the conclusion was correct). Although ultimately Champollion's discoveries clashed with church dogma, I don't think it wasn't until much later that the church became concerned about him.Elakazal (talk) 05:44, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Suggest section on the reaction of the Catholic Church

message: I did not realize Egyption hieroglyphs were a cypher.  A cypher is a character or symbol substitution scheme intended to obfuscate the original message.  Perhaps "translate" is a better choice.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brett h l (talk • contribs) 12:22, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: "Decipherment" is the usual word for finding the key to, or making sense of, a form of writing that was previously not understood. "Translation" is a different thing: it means turning words or sentences in one language into another language. In the case of ancient Egyptian, the script had to be deciphered before the texts could be translated: the two processes are not the same. Andrew Dalby 18:26, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

text: The word "decipher" means "to find the meaning of (something that is difficult to read or understand)" and "decipherment" is absolutely correct here. See, for instance, Maurice Pope's book describing the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and other ancient writing systems, The Story of Decipherment.
Uffda a la mode (talk) 23:04, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Decipherment? 

message: There is a lot more to be said I found this at Questia  J8079s (talk) 18:49, 12 November 2014 (UTC
:This is interesting too 
::One more  I got these at Questia J8079s (talk) 05:35, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  sources 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Just noting that I've tried to use British English in this article, even though I'm American, because the only English-speaking figures mentioned in the article were British. A. Parrot (talk) 22:59, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: British English

message: I've just removed a paragraph from the lead section that was added in September. A lot of this text was simply redundant with what the article already said, but one sentence brought up a unique point: "It contributed to comparative linguistics, helping trace linguistic roots and relationships".
The most obvious linguistic insight made possible by the decipherment would seem to be the existence of the Afroasiatic language family, and I was thinking I might be able to find sources to support the claim. Lepsius was the first person to posit a forerunner to the modern understanding of the Afroasiatic languages (in the racially-biased form of the "Hamitic hypothesis"). However, I've looked for a bit and haven't come across sources that explicitly say Lepsius was only able to make the insight because of his work on Egyptian (this source doesn't quite say it). For all I know, it might have been theoretically possible to make the connection using only Coptic. Certainly one would suspect that the reason Afroasiatic is detectable, despite being the oldest known language family, is because its written records go back so far—Egyptian and Akkadian are literally the second and third languages to appear in writing. And I seem to recall someone, probably on the ref desk, saying that the Proto-Afroasiatic consonant-based structure was only preserved in Semitic and the pre-Coptic forms of Egyptian.  But for now, the point is unsupported. A. Parrot (talk) 07:37, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comparative linguistics