Deciphering Egyptian Script
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In 1798, Napoleon set out on an expedition to Egypt with 38,000 soldiers and 175 scholars. In 1799, in the village of Rosetta (now called Rashid), just 50 km from Alexandria, Pierre-François Bouchard (1772–1822), an officer of the expedition, discovered the Rosetta Stone—a basalt stele measuring 72 cm wide, 125 cm high, and 28 cm thick—while building a fort. However, when Napoleon’s army was defeated by the British army in Alexandria in 1801, many of the Egyptian artifacts they had found ended up in British hands. As a result, since 1802, the Rosetta Stone has been stored and displayed at the British Museum. But since Napoleon’s army had taken a plaster cast of the stone back to France, the French could also study it just like the British.
At the top of the Rosetta Stone are Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the middle is Egyptian demotic script, and at the bottom is Greek script. The Rosetta Stone was created in 196 B.C. in celebration of the first anniversary of the coronation of 13-year-old Pharaoh Ptolemy V (205–180 B.C.). The inscription praised the Pharaoh for restoring order to a chaotic state, and since Egypt at the time was part of the Greek-founded New Kingdom, the inscription included the hieroglyphs used by priests, the demotic script used by common people, and Greek script. Because the same text was written in three different scripts, the Rosetta Stone was an attractive object for scholars trying to decipher the forgotten hieroglyphs since the 4th century. At the time, linguists were fluent in Ancient Greek.
Then how did they confirm that all parts of the Rosetta Stone conveyed the same content? In the final sentence of the Greek part, it says, “This is written in sacred characters, demotic, and Greek.” Here, “sacred characters” refer to hieroglyphs, which confirmed that the same content was written in three scripts on the Rosetta Stone (1799). (ref)
French linguists began focusing first on the demotic script. This was because the demotic section, located in the middle of the stone, was less damaged than the hieroglyphs and looked more symbolic—i.e., more like actual letters. Among them, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) assumed that Greek names would be written with demotic characters representing the same sounds. By comparing the Greek section with the demotic section, he identified Greek names written in demotic. In 1802, he discovered five names—“Alexandros”, “Alexandreia”, “Ptolemaios”, “Arsinoe”, and “Epiphanes”—and identified their phonetic values. He thus decoded 16 demotic letters. (ref) That same year, his student Johan David Åkerblad (1763–1819) continued the research and, in just two months, successfully matched all 29 demotic characters to alphabet letters. Åkerblad was able to do this because he knew Coptic, which is derived from the Egyptian demotic language. Though an ancient Egyptian language, Coptic is still used in the worship services of the Coptic Church, which comprises about 10% of Egypt’s population. His knowledge of Coptic helped him recognize words like ‘love’, ‘temple’, and ‘Greek’, and based on the similarities with Coptic, he hypothesized that the demotic script was phonetic. (ref)
Next, Thomas Young (1773–1829) joined the Rosetta Stone decipherment fever. He was also renowned as a scientist. Young was talented in optics, psychology, physics, music, and Egyptology, and, above all, was a linguistic genius fluent in 14 languages including English, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic. While interpreting the Greek text, he studied the frequency of specific words like “and” and “king”. He then selected candidate demotic words with similar frequencies and compared them with the 29 characters identified by Åkerblad. By 1814, he had translated all of the demotic script. He also analyzed the hieroglyphs using the same method and discovered that the characters enclosed in rectangles or ovals (cartouches) represented important names (e.g., Ptolemy). However, because hieroglyphs were a mix of ideograms and phonetic symbols, Young, assuming hieroglyphs were purely phonetic like Åkerblad did, ultimately failed to decipher them.
It wasn’t until another linguistic genius, Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), emerged that Egyptian hieroglyphs could finally be deciphered. At age 17 in 1807, he became a professor in recognition of his talent, and by age 20 he could speak 12 languages, including Coptic, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, and Chinese. He believed that to decipher hieroglyphs, one must start with the names of kings. This was because the Greek part of the Rosetta Stone praised King Ptolemy, so he reasoned that the hieroglyphic text must include the king’s name multiple times. He focused on the cartouches surrounded by ovals, assuming they represented royal names, which turned out to be correct. In fact, this idea was consistent with one of Thomas Young’s findings. Likely, there was already a general assumption that characters enclosed in ovals signified something special, and Young was the first to express this logically.
Figure 1. Cartouche enclosed in an oval
In 1821, Champollion further analyzed the hieroglyphs on the obelisk of Philae Island. The Philae obelisk, excavated in 1815 by archaeologist William John Bankes (1786–1855), contained both hieroglyphs and Greek text like the Rosetta Stone, and was called “the second Rosetta Stone.” The Greek part of the obelisk contained the name Ptolemy, and the same cartouche as seen on the Rosetta Stone, enabling Champollion to identify the hieroglyphs for Ptolemy. This was the first moment of hieroglyphic decipherment.
Figure 2. Obelisk
The obelisk had another cartouche. Champollion guessed that it likely represented Queen Cleopatra. He compared the hieroglyphs for Ptolemy and Cleopatra side by side.
Figure 3. Cartouches of Ptolemy (left) and Cleopatra (right)
Perhaps Champollion wondered whether the hieroglyphs might correspond directly to Greek letters. Although the Greek spelling of “Ptolemy” is “PTOLMIS” and that of “Cleopatra” is “CLEOPATRA”, and their number of characters doesn’t match the hieroglyphs exactly, he decided to try anyway. Champollion likely went through the following process on his own:
Figure 4. Deciphering Example
In the image above, five character types are common between the two cartouches (knife, lion statue, bell with string, oval, square). In the Greek spellings, the common letters are P, O, and L. So, some of the shared symbols in both cartouches might represent these letters, while others might be modifiers like “Queen.” Therefore, it’s more effective to determine which hieroglyphs correspond to P, O, and L than vice versa. For example, in the Greek spelling of Ptolemy, P is the first letter, and in Cleopatra, P appears in the middle. This excludes the oval, which appears at the end in both cartouches. Hence, P must be either the square or the knife. But since the knife appears twice in Ptolemy’s cartouche and the Greek spelling doesn’t have repeated letters, P must be the square. From this, he discovered that hieroglyphs are written right to left. The knife-shaped glyph must not be a duplicate character, since no Greek letter in “Ptolemy” appears consecutively. This allowed a one-to-one match between the 7 hieroglyphs in Ptolemy’s cartouche and the 7 Greek letters. He then applied the same logic to Cleopatra’s cartouche.
Figure 5. Cartouches of Ptolemy (left) and Cleopatra (right)
Then he found that the positions of three common hieroglyphs matched the positions of the common Greek letters P, O, and L in “PTOLMIS” and “CLEOPATRA.” He also discovered that hieroglyphs are written right to left and that two different symbols representing T were allophones—like f and ph. Through this, Champollion understood how hieroglyphs were structured.
Having realized that Greek-origin names should be interpreted phonetically, Champollion collected as many papyri as he could from the Ptolemaic and early Roman periods of Egyptian history. On September 14, 1822, he successfully deciphered the names of 27 pharaohs and revealed the phonetic values of all hieroglyphic characters.
That same year, he suddenly remembered that the word for the sun god in Coptic was Ra, and that Egyptian often omitted the vowel e. He then successfully deciphered the hieroglyphs for Ramses. This was the first time an Egyptian-origin name had been deciphered. He then also decoded Thutmes using a similar method, through which he grasped the basic principles of hieroglyphic composition. At age 31, he announced, “Hieroglyphs have phonetic properties,” which caused a stir in academia. In the 5th century A.D., Horapollo published Hieroglyphica, claiming that all hieroglyphs conveyed meanings related to their pictorial forms—like three lines meaning water or a flag meaning god. For over 1000 years, no scholar ever questioned this idea. Then one curious person came along—genius or not—and challenged the prevailing paradigm. Thus, 23 years after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, the mystery of hieroglyphs was fully solved in 1822. Later, he visited the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy, to study papyri filled with names and reigns of pharaohs. In 1828, he also spent six months in Egypt visiting temples, palaces, and tombs to confirm his interpretation was correct. He even calculated that Egypt’s founding year was 5867 B.C. (ref) These sources were used to confirm the overall data and factual accuracy of the article.
And on July 23, 2025, Google DeepMind released an AI model for restoring ancient scripts called ‘Aeneas’, as open source. Going forward, such efforts are expected to be enhanced and accelerated by AI.
Input: 2019.08.11 11:42
Updated: 2025.07.25 12:46