The decipherment of Egyptian opened the way to recovering an understanding of the Egyptian language in all of its stages and scripts. An enormous undertaking (which continues in the present) was to record texts of all types for study. After the early 19th-century expeditions, Egyptologists such as Auguste Mariette, Heinrich Brugsch, Emile Chassinat, and Johannes Dumichen continued to record and publish Egyptian
Inscriptions from major temples, such as Edfu and Dendera. Chassinat published the Edfu temple inscriptions in eight volumes, while publication of the Dendera temple inscriptions continues in the present, by Sylvie Cauville. A monumental project to record Egyptian tombs for the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) was undertaken at several sites in Middle Egypt by Norman de Garis Davies (1865-1941) and Percy Newberry (1869-1949). Their work is especially valuable today because many of these tombs are in such a poor state of preservation. James Henry Breasted’s compilation of ancient Egyptian historical records later led to the Oriental Institute’s Epigraphic Survey, which continues in the present (see 1.4).
At the same time progress on understanding the structure and grammar of ancient Egyptian was also being made, mainly in European universities. Adolf Erman (18541937) was the first Egyptologist to divide the language into Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian. His translations, as well as those of Heinrich Brugsch (1827-94), are recognized as the first generally reliable ones. Important contributions in hieratic and demotic were
Box 2-B Decipherment of Egyptian
Renaissance scholars who tried to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs were misled by ancient Greek historians, who believed that the signs were symbolic and not phonetic. But some progress was made in the late 18th century by Georg Zoega, a scholar of Coptic manuscripts who compiled a corpus of hieroglyphic signs. Decipherment was greatly aided by the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Rashid (ancient Rosetta) in the Nile Delta by French soldiers digging fortifications. In Cairo French savants of the Napoleonic expedition soon recognized that the stone was bilingual, in Egyptian and Greek. The French circulated copies of the Rosetta Stone before it was surrendered to the British after Napoleon’s defeat in Egypt (it is now in the British Museum in London).
The Rosetta Stone is a stela dating to 196 bc, in the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes. It was written in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top (the least well preserved part), demotic in the middle, and a Greek translation at the bottom. The inscription records a decree of the General Council of Egyptian priests in the city of Memphis. Titles and epithets of the king are given, as are royal benefactions following the king’s coronation, such as gifts to temples and remission of taxes and debts. The priests reciprocated by honoring the king in temples.
By 1802 translations of the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone had appeared, and the first studies of the demotic text were done by a French scholar, Baron Sylvestre de Sacy (1758-1838). His student, the Swedish diplomat Johan Akerblad (1763-1819), correctly identified proper names in the demotic text, and made a list of 29 demotic alphabetic signs, about half of which were correct. But Akerblad thought that all demotic signs were alphabetic, and he got no further in decipherment.
A major breakthrough was made in 1814 by the English scholar and linguist Thomas Young (17731829). Young was also a practicing physician and did research on physiological optics, discovering the undulatory theory of light in 1802. Working first with a copy of the Rosetta Stone, Young later studied monumental inscriptions recorded in the Description de I’Egypte (see Box 1-A). Young recognized that Egyptian writing was a mix of different types of signs, and that the demotic script was related to the hieroglyphs. Although on the brink of deciphering Egyptian with his 1819 publication of a list of alphabetic signs, Young did not fully succeed because of his belief that the signs were mainly symbolic, with only limited phonetic components.
Figure 2.4 Jean-Frangois Champollion (1790-1832). Painting from 1831 by Leon Cogniet, INV. 3294 Paris, Musee du Louvre. akg-images/Erich Lessing
Jean-Franpois Champollion is credited with deciphering ancient Egyptian because he was the first to prove, by systematic analysis, that the hieroglyphic writing system was significantly phonetic. Working with a copy of a bilingual text in Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs, from an obelisk brought to England by the traveler W. J. Bankes (1786-1855), Champollion recognized the phonetic values of signs in two cartouches, of the rulers Ptolemy and Cleopatra. He then identified the phonetic values of more Egyptian hieroglyphs from copies of temple inscriptions, expounding his discovery in the famous “Lettre a Monsieur Dacier” in 1822. In his 1824 Precis of the Hieroglyphic System (Precis du systeme hieroglyphique), Champollion made a classified list of Egyptian signs, and formulated a system of grammar and general decipherment, which laid the foundation for all Egyptological studies of the last two centuries. Champollion’s great achievement built upon his knowledge of Coptic, which helped him to identify many hieroglyphic signs and their phonetic values from their Coptic equivalents. But Champollion did not identify multiconsonantal signs, which was subsequently accomplished by Carl Richard Lepsius.
Made by Francis Llewellyn Griffith, and in demotic and Coptic by Wilhelm Spiegelberg (1870-1930). Erman was also responsible, along with Hermann Grapow (1885-1967), for the publication of an eleven-volume Egyptian dictionary (1926-63). Another German scholar, Kurt Sethe (1869-1934), published vast numbers of texts and made impressive contributions in his studies of the Egyptian verbal system, the most complex aspect of the written language.
Alan H. Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar (1927) continues to be a major work for the study of the classical period of the Egyptian language (Middle Egyptian). Hans Polotsky’s 1944 study of Coptic syntax has also had major implications for the study of Egyptian. Work on understanding the Egyptian language and the meanings of ancient texts and words continues to be a very lively area of Egyptology.
World History
