The Rosetta Stone: How We Cracked Egyptian Hieroglyphs

A Thousand Years of Silence

By the fifth century AD, the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphs had been lost. The last known hieroglyphic inscription dates to 394 AD, carved at the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae. After that, the tradition died. The priests who had maintained the knowledge through centuries of Greek and Roman rule were gone, their temples closed, their schools disbanded.

For the next fourteen centuries, the hieroglyphs remained visible but unreadable. They covered the temples and tombs of Egypt in profusion -- thousands of inscriptions, millions of signs -- and no one alive could read a single word. European scholars assumed the signs were symbolic or mystical, representing ideas rather than sounds. The assumption was wrong, and it blocked progress for generations.

The breakthrough came, as breakthroughs often do, from an accident of war.

The Stone

In July 1799, French soldiers under Napoleon's command were reinforcing the fortifications at the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta when they uncovered a slab of dark granodiorite bearing three blocks of text. The top section was in hieroglyphs. The middle section was in a cursive Egyptian script called Demotic. The bottom section was in Greek.

The significance was immediately recognized. If the three texts said the same thing -- and the Greek text could be read -- then the stone was a bilingual key that might unlock the hieroglyphs.

The Greek section was translated quickly. It was a decree issued in 196 BC by a council of priests at Memphis, honoring the Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The decree listed the king's benefactions to the temples and prescribed that it be set up in temples across Egypt in three scripts: "sacred letters" (hieroglyphs), "native letters" (Demotic), and "Greek letters."

The race to use the Greek to crack the hieroglyphs began immediately.

Thomas Young and the First Steps

Thomas Young, the English polymath who also contributed to the wave theory of light, made the first significant progress. Working in the 1810s, Young focused on the Demotic text and made two critical observations.

First, he noticed that some Demotic signs resembled simplified versions of hieroglyphic signs, suggesting a developmental relationship between the scripts. Second, he identified a group of hieroglyphic signs enclosed in oval rings -- now called cartouches -- and correctly guessed that these spelled the name of Ptolemy. By matching the cartouche signs to the known Greek spelling, he assigned phonetic values to several hieroglyphic signs.

Young proved that hieroglyphs could represent sounds, not just ideas. But he did not go further. He believed that phonetic spelling was used only for foreign names -- that native Egyptian words were written ideographically. This was wrong, and the error prevented him from achieving the full decipherment.

Champollion and the Breakthrough

Jean-Francois Champollion, a French linguist who had been obsessed with Egypt since childhood, succeeded where Young had stopped. Champollion had one crucial advantage: he knew Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, which survived as the liturgical language of the Egyptian Christian church. Coptic was written in a modified Greek alphabet, so its pronunciation was known. If the hieroglyphs recorded the same language that Coptic preserved, Champollion could use Coptic to check his readings.

In September 1822, Champollion received copies of inscriptions from the temple of Abu Simbel, including cartouches that did not spell foreign names. One cartouche contained four signs. The first was a disc -- which Champollion knew from the Rosetta Stone represented the sun, pronounced ra in Coptic. The last two signs were identical -- he had already assigned them the value s from the Ptolemy cartouche. The middle sign was unknown.

The cartouche read: Ra-?-s-s. Champollion knew from Coptic that the Egyptian word for "born" was mes or mis. If the unknown sign was m, the name was Ra-m-s-s -- Ramesses.

He had it. The hieroglyphs were not purely symbolic. They recorded the Egyptian language phonetically, using a mixture of phonetic signs, logograms, and determinatives. The system was complex but regular, and Champollion's knowledge of Coptic gave him the pronunciation key that turned silent symbols into spoken words.

Champollion announced his discovery in his famous Lettre a M. Dacier on September 27, 1822. He spent the next decade refining and extending the decipherment before his death in 1832 at the age of 41.

What the Decipherment Revealed

The decipherment of hieroglyphs opened three thousand years of Egyptian history to direct reading. Before Champollion, knowledge of ancient Egypt came from Greek and Roman authors -- Herodotus, Diodorus, Manetho. After Champollion, the Egyptians could speak for themselves.

The inscriptions revealed a civilization of extraordinary depth: religious texts, administrative records, literary works, medical treatises, love poetry, legal documents, diplomatic correspondence. The Book of the Dead, the Instruction of Ptahhotep, the Tale of Sinuhe, the Amarna letters -- all became readable.

For genealogy and historical linguistics, the decipherment provided an anchor point. Egyptian is an Afroasiatic language, related to Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The hieroglyphic records, stretching back to roughly 3200 BC, provide one of the longest continuous language records in human history, invaluable for understanding language change over time.

The Lesson of the Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone's lesson extends beyond Egyptology. It demonstrates that undeciphered scripts can be cracked when three conditions are met: a bilingual or multilingual text, a sufficient corpus of inscriptions, and knowledge of a related language.

Linear B was deciphered in 1952 because Michael Ventris recognized it as Greek. The Rosetta Stone worked because Champollion knew Coptic. In both cases, the key was not a code-breaking trick but a linguistic connection -- a bridge between the unknown script and a known language.

The scripts that remain undeciphered -- Linear A, the Indus script, Proto-Elamite -- are locked because those bridges have not been found. The languages they record are unknown, and no bilingual key has surfaced.

The Rosetta Stone sits today in the British Museum, Room 4, behind glass. It is the most visited object in the museum. Millions of people look at it every year, most of them unable to read a single sign on its surface. But because of what it made possible, we can read the words of a civilization that fell silent two thousand years ago and hear them speak again.