On Saturday, scholars and diplomats in Cairo, Paris and London marked the 203rd anniversary of the day in 1822 when French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion announced that he had deciphered ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs after nearly two decades of studying the Rosetta Stone, reported Al-Masry Al-Youm. On that day he unveiled a method that opened a window into pharaonic civilization, noted Live Science.
Champollion laid the foundation of modern Egyptology by comparing the Rosetta Stone’s three scripts—hieroglyphic, demotic and ancient Greek. The 44-inch-tall, 1,680-pound granodiorite stela was unearthed by French soldiers in July 1799 while they fortified Rashid (Rosetta) during Napoleon’s expedition. After the French defeat by Ottoman and British forces in 1801, the stone went to the British Museum under the Treaty of Alexandria, where it remains.
The inscription on the stone is a royal decree issued in 196 BCE that honored the boy-king Ptolemy V Epiphanes by promising tax relief, pardons for prisoners and the installation of the monarch’s statues in every temple. Copies of the decree were set up across Egypt.
Before Champollion’s success, scholars tried to read the symbols. In 1802 Swedish diplomat Thomas Åkerblad observed that demotic resembled Coptic. British polymath Thomas Young linked the phonetic hieroglyphs for Ptolemy and matched 218 demotic words to about 200 hieroglyphs, but he assumed that only royal names were phonetic, a limit pointed out by French researcher Christian Leplante.
Champollion, born on December 23, 1790 in Figeac, attacked the puzzle through language study. He mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, Persian and Sanskrit and compiled a Coptic dictionary, viewing Coptic as the living descendant of ancient Egyptian. He spent eleven years immersed in Near-Eastern and Coptic languages under leading scholars.
In Grenoble he befriended Joseph Fourier, former secretary of Napoleon’s scientific mission to Egypt, who gave him access to a collection of artifacts. His 1806 thesis for the University of Grenoble compared Coptic and hieroglyphic place names. On September 14, 1822 he rushed into his brother’s office in Paris and cried, “I have got what I wanted!” said the French Egyptologist, according to Youm7. Two weeks later he presented his findings at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, then collapsed and reportedly needed five days to recover, noted Live Science.
Champollion showed that the signs were phonetic letters that could spell the entire language. He verified his alphabet on other monuments, including the base of an obelisk in Britain, and soon read inscriptions that had been silent for 1,600 years. From 1828 to 1830 he led the first systematic survey of Egyptian monuments and later served as curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre and head of its Egyptology department. He also catalogued the Turin collection before dying in Paris on March 4, 1832.
The Rosetta Stone’s decipherment allowed scholars to read the Book of the Dead, record embalming recipes and document surgical procedures, showing that ancient Egyptians diagnosed and treated many diseases and even performed surgery. Later research traced dynastic histories and explored daily life among royals and commoners.
Arabic scholars also contributed to the effort. Iraqi polymath Ahmad ibn Abī Bakr ibn Wahshīyah wrote in the 10th century that hieroglyphic symbols represented phonetic letters, an idea published in English in 1806. Egyptian Sufi Dhū al-Nūn al-Miṣrī studied Coptic and pharaonic symbols, and modern researcher Okasha El-Daly pointed to Arabic manuscripts that mapped hieroglyphic signs to sounds.
More than two centuries after Champollion’s announcement, Egyptians continue to call for the stone’s return from the British Museum, describing it as an ambassador of their heritage.
Written with the help of a news-analysis system.