Eureka Finding the key to ancient Egypt

Champollion’s public reading of the Lettre à M. Dacier before the Académie on 27 September 1822 marked the birth of Egyptology. In the letter, Champollion outlined his findings on the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the reasoning behind them. With his conclusions in hand scholars could finally translate the records of a civilisation that had endured for thousands of years. 

Copy of the Lettre à M. Dacier, Paris, France, 1822. 

Champollion had been guided by both the advances and the shortcomings of his peers and predecessors. Elaborating on the link between the different scripts they found, they had concluded that the handwritten hieratic script of the papyri was related to hieroglyphs, and that the handwritten demotic developed from the hieratic, and consequently was closely linked to hieroglyphs as well. Initially, Champollion followed previous scholars in stating that all Egyptian scripts represented things or ideas (i.e. they were ideographic scripts), not the sounds of spoken language (phonetic scripts). He made one crucial exception: hieroglyphs could represent spoken language when used phonetically to write non-Egyptian proper names, such as Ptolemy and Berenice, two Greek royal names used during the Ptolemaic period (332–30 BC). Although this had already been suggested by his rival, the British polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829), Champollion improved Young’s readings of the names of many Greek and Roman rulers of Egypt by reading them alphabetically, i.e. assigning one sound to each sign.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/JLfRznw