Reading Practice 14

[1] Egyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. The word Hieroglyph comes from the Greek word hieroglyphic, meaning ‘sacred carvings’. Hieroglyphs were first considered to be simple picture writing. However, it was later discovered that the hieroglyphs actually represent sounds, like the letters in English.

 

[2] Other scripts, or ‘hieratic’ and ‘demotic’ scripts, were used for daily writing in Ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptian writing dates back to 394 AD. At the end of the fourth century AD, any language associated with paganism was forbidden with the advent of Christianity. At this point, the ‘Coptic’ script, a language with 24 letters from the Greek alphabet, replaced hieroglyphs. Ancient Egyptian developed into this Coptic language. Eventually, Coptic was replaced by Arabic in the 11th century.

 

[3] In 1799, The Rosetta Stone was discovered by the French army of Napoleon in the Nile Delta. The stone was inscribed with text in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs. It was handed over to the British and remains at the British Museum until today. The inscription on the stone was revealed as a law, written in these three forms of text – indicating that it could help in the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. However, although the meaning of the hieroglyphs could be interpreted, it was still not possible to understand the phonetics of the ancient language.

 

[4] In 1814, a British polymath called Thomas Young had a breakthrough in the phonetics of hieroglyphs by comparing names (Ptolemy and Berenika) with Greek words. He concentrated on a group of hieroglyphs that were enclosed by a cartouche, or loop. He thought these special hieroglyphs represented something special, such as the name of the Pharaoh. If so, he could connect the phonetics of the name with the corresponding hieroglyphs as the name would be pronounced similarly in a different language. He matched the letters of the name with the hieroglyphs. He applied the same technique on another cartouche and continued to identify sounds of the ancient language. However, Young lost interest in the work in 1819.

 

[5] Jean-François Champollion, a French philologist, applied Young’s technique to other names, such as Alexander and Cleopatra and made important breakthroughs in 1822 when he discovered hieroglyphs were phonetic and their underlying language was Egyptian. He discovered that the writers of hieroglyphs used the rebus principle – breaking long words into phonetic components and using images to represent those sounds. The word ‘belief’ could be represented by pictures of a bee and a leaf. He is famous for having cracked the code of a four-lettered cartouche, starting with the picture of a sun or ‘Ra’, the Egyptian sun god. Fluent in Coptic, Champollion discovered the meaning of the word ‘Ra me ses ‘or Rameses. The importance of the sun in the Rameses cartouche is vital because it indicates the language of the scribes. Champollion continued to prove that the Coptic scribes depended on using a phonetic alphabet.

 

[6] Champollion continued to do an in-depth study of hieroglyphs and realized that the hieroglyphs represented phonetic values and sometimes two or three consonants. In this way, the writers could use simple hieroglyphs to spell a word. Champollion launched his first trip to Egypt in July 1828. He was then able to study the hieroglyphs covering the Egyptian temples and decode them accurately. Only four years later, Champollion died, aged 41. His work remains a valuable contribution to the understanding and interpretation of hieroglyphs today.