The Rosetta Stone: How a Lost Script Was Deciphered

The Rosetta Stone became the key to Egyptian hieroglyphs because it carries the same decree three times: in hieroglyphs, in demotic, the everyday Egyptian script, and in Greek, which European scholars could already read. Even with that crib, it took more than twenty years and two rival scholars, the English polymath Thomas Young and the French linguist Jean-François Champollion, to turn the matching texts into a working decipherment.

Why could no one read hieroglyphs for 1,400 years?

The last datable hieroglyphic inscription is a graffito on the Gate of Hadrian at Philae, an island temple on the Nile, cut on the festival of Osiris's birthday in the year we call 394 CE. The last known demotic text was written at Philae in December 452. As Christianity spread and the old temples closed, the priests trained in the sacred script died out, and the knowledge of how to read it went with them. It took some 1,400 years to recover. What survived instead was a misunderstanding. The Hieroglyphica, a Greek treatise attributed to the fifth-century Egyptian writer Horapollo, explained each sign as a symbol with a hidden meaning. A goose meant "son," it claimed, because the bird "is excessively fond of its offspring," in the words of an English translation. Some of its meanings were right, but the reasons it gave were invented, and the idea that hieroglyphs were pure symbols with no sounds attached steered European scholars wrong for centuries.

What made the Rosetta Stone the key?

In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt, partly to threaten Britain's route to India, and brought more than 160 scholars, scientists, engineers and artists with his army. On or about July 15, 1799, soldiers rebuilding an old fort near Rashid, a port Europeans called Rosetta, found a broken slab built into one of its walls. The fort dated from around 1470, and its builders had reused ancient stone. Pierre-François Bouchard, the engineer officer in charge, saw at once that the find mattered.

The slab is part of a larger stela, about 112 centimeters tall as it survives, made of dark gray granodiorite with a pink vein. It was long described as basalt, and it weighs roughly three-quarters of a tonne. Its text records a decree agreed by a council of Egyptian priests at Memphis on March 27, 196 BCE, a year after the coronation of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V. The decree praises the king's good deeds, from tax remissions to gifts for the temples, and in return orders statues, festivals and a cult in his honor. What it promises, and why its priests chose three scripts, is the subject of our article on the decree itself. For decipherers, what mattered was the layout. The decree appears three times: 14 surviving lines of hieroglyphs at the top, 32 lines of demotic in the middle and 54 of Greek at the bottom. Strictly, it is one decree in two languages, Egyptian and Greek, written in three scripts, and the three versions are not identical word for word. But scholars could read the Greek, so they knew roughly what the Egyptian sections had to say. The stone did not stay French for long. Under the terms of the French surrender at Alexandria in 1801 it passed to the British, and it has been in the British Museum since 1802, on display almost continuously apart from two years underground during the First World War.

How did Thomas Young crack the first royal name?

The first real progress came from Thomas Young, an English physician whose experiments on the interference of light had revived the wave theory of light. He began studying the Rosetta Stone in 1814. Earlier scholars had already suggested that the oval rings called cartouches held royal names, and that foreign names might be spelled out by sound. Young tested the idea on the cartouche that corresponded to "Ptolemy" in the Greek, reasoning that a Greek name had to be written with signs for sounds, and worked through it sign by sign. In his article "Egypt," written in 1818 for a supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and published in 1819, Young proposed sound values for 13 signs from the names of Ptolemy and Berenice. According to his biographer Andrew Robinson, six of the 13 were right and three half right, while the other four missed; he read several signs as syllables rather than single sounds. He also gave translations for 200 hieroglyphic words (and 218 demotic ones), and about 80 of his demotic–hieroglyphic equivalents have stood the test of time. But Young assumed that sound-based writing was used only for foreign names, and that native Egyptian words were written in symbols. That assumption would be his limit.

How did Champollion read the pharaohs' own names?

Jean-François Champollion, born in Figeac in 1790, came at the problem with a different tool: Coptic. The language of Egypt's Christians, Coptic is a late form of Egyptian written mainly in Greek letters plus six or seven extra signs borrowed from demotic, and it survives in the liturgy of the Coptic Church. Champollion learned it from a Coptic priest in Paris and practiced it so constantly that he said he spoke it to himself.

His first test case was an obelisk from Philae that the English collector William Bankes had brought to England. It bore a Greek inscription on its base and two cartouches that Bankes had guessed were Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and Champollion had a copy of the hieroglyphs by early 1822. The two names shared several sounds. Among the matching signs, the square was P, the lasso O and the lion L. The T sound, however, was a semicircle in Ptolemy but an open hand in Cleopatra, and Champollion concluded that Egyptian scribes could write the same sound with different signs. The decisive moment, by tradition, came on September 14, 1822, as he worked through copies of temple inscriptions that included drawings from Abu Simbel. One cartouche began with a sun disk, which he read as rē, the Coptic word for the sun, and ended with two signs he already knew stood for s. The middle signs appeared together on the Rosetta Stone where the Greek text speaks of birth, and the Coptic word mise means "to give birth." Put together, the name read Ramesses: a native pharaoh who had reigned about a thousand years before the Ptolemies, written with sound signs. An ibis, the bird of the god Thoth, followed by the same signs, gave Thutmose. The story goes that he hurried to his brother Jacques-Joseph's office, cried "Je tiens mon affaire!" ("I've got it!") and collapsed. On September 27, 1822, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres heard his Lettre à M. Dacier, which set out an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphs used for the titles and names of Egypt's Greek and Roman rulers. Two years later, his Précis du système hiéroglyphique described the whole system. Hieroglyphic writing, he concluded, is a complex system, a script at the same time figurative, symbolic and phonetic, "dans un même texte, dans une même phrase, je dirais presque dans un même mot": in the same text, the same sentence and, he would almost say, the same word. In the same book he credited Young with correctly identifying several sound signs. The decipherment did not open every text overnight. Champollion went on to study Egyptian king lists and to record temple reliefs on his expedition to Egypt, but his grammar of the language appeared only in 1836, four years after his death. Much of Egypt's writing was not in hieroglyphs at all but in hieratic, a cursive script, and the great medical papyri, the Ebers and the Edwin Smith, were not published until 1875 and 1930. Scholars are still cracking lost scripts today, now with help from artificial intelligence. The Rosetta Stone did not translate itself. It gave two rival scholars a known text to test their guesses against, a single priestly decree that, read three ways, was enough to give ancient Egypt back its voice.