How did the Rosetta stone provide the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics?

The Rosetta Stone-Key to Egyptian eroglyphics It was the year 1799. Four miles from the small Egyptian town of Rashid, or Rosetta, a corps of French soldiers was hard at work making alterations on Fort Julien. Thrown onto the defensive by the victory of the British fleet under Nelson, the French army under Napoleon was preparing for a last stand Suddenly, one of the soldiers came across a most unusual stone.It was black and had a metallic ring when struck by the workman's pick.

Three of the corners had broken away. Looking more closely, he noticed that it was covered with curious writing.An officer named Boussard recognized the stone's value. Unquestionably the writing was very old.

What was more, there were different types of writing making up the inscription, one of which included Greek characters When Napoleon heard about the stone, he ordered that copies of it be made, and later, when the stone was surrendered as part of the spoil of war, it was taken to England.By the end of 1802 it was on exhibition in the British Museum, where it still occupies the most prominent position in the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery The Rosetta Stone is of importance to linguists because its inscription is in two languages, Egyptian and Greek. At the top, the intriguing hieroglyphic characters are incised on the stone, and below this appears the demotic, or more popular simplified form, the writing of the people in general. The last band at the bottom contains the Greek translation Early Work on This New Key Unknown writing has always attracted the curiosity of man.

But cracking the most difficult and secret of codes has often proved simple by comparison with some ancient scripts. In the past, Egyptian hieroglyphics had been mistaken for mere ornamentation. Somehow the Chinese were thought to be involved with them, and at best they were viewed as a purely pictorial symbolism.

But during the eighteenth century more serious attempts were made to unravel their mysteries, and ideas and theories began to take shape The Rosetta Stone was quickly recognized as a find of immense value to students of Egypt's history. The translation of the Greek portion had appeared in French and English by 1802, and, armed with this, scholars in several countries began to study the Egyptian texts. David Akerblad, a Swedish Orientalist, identified all the Greek names in the demotic section and formed a partial alphabet of sixteen letters.

However, was in thinking that the demotic script was exclusively alphabetic In 1814 an English scientist, Thomas Young, began to make some progress with the hieroglyphics. He began by dividing up the whole of the texts to correspond with the Greek. He noticed something that other investigators before him had commented upon.

Six groups of signs were enclosed in an oblong ring called a cartouche, and this made them stand out prominently from the other signs. Their positions corresponded with a name in the Greek text, that of King Ptolemy. Young tried to break down the signs into the letters and syllables of his name.

The result was as follows: Another Englishman, W. J. Bankes, discovered an obelisk on the island of Philae, on the river Nile, and identified the cartouche of Cleopatra.It contained three of the signs found in the cartouche of Ptolemy.

With other hieroglyphic texts to help him, and some judicious guessing thrown in as well, Young had a list of more than 200 words by around 1818, but only about a third of these were right. In addition, however, he was the first to realize that many of the signs had a phonetic or syllabic value At this point, Young lost interest in his studies, and faded from the scene. The field was left open for the man who was to crack the secrets of Egypt's ancient past in the most decisive and final manner Champollion Presses the Search Jean François Champollion was not yet nine when the Rosetta Stone was found.

At an early age he realized that the ancient Coptic language had descended from the still older Egyptian language, and so he set about mastering Coptic. That this was a vital stepping-stone was demonstrated when his knowledge of Coptic led him to his first success with the hieroglyphics As various signs yielded up their meanings through the intensive and painstaking efforts of Champollion, a simple but important idea struck him, in 1821. He added up the number of hieroglyphic signs on the Rosetta Stone, and found them to total 1,419.

But the Greek text contained only 486 words, so clearly the hieroglyphics could not be just ideographs or symbols, as there were three times as many of them He returned to the name Ptolemy, already partly deciphered by Young. Correctly he now read it as 'Ptolmis' as follows: With the discovery of the Bankes obelisk, Champollion could also correct his own suggested reading of the cartouche for Cleopatra. Having analyzed these two names letter by letter, Champollion studied every royal cartouche within reach As name after name was spelled out, it was noticed that they always seemed to belong to the later declining period of Egyptian history, in Ptolemaic and Roman times; too, none of the names were genuinely Egyptian, but foreign.

Would his interpretation also open up the secrets of the more ancient Pharaohs? One day a different cartouche appeared. The first sign he knew to be the sun, which in Coptic is 'Re.

' At the end was a double 's. ' If the middle sign was an 'm,' why, the name must be 'R - m - s - s,' Rameses! The hieroglyphics had not changed radically for hundreds of years Now at last Champollion was certain that he had found the key to unlock the secrets of Egyptian history, but the excited and relentless search, carried on often against his physical needs, had left him weak and exhausted.

For nearly a week he was too ill to set down his findings in a presentable manner. When his evidence was made known in 1822 it aroused much skepticism in certain quarters, and until his death from a stroke in 1832 he was unable to shake off the controversial storm that his decipherment had evoked.

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