The Decipherment of Hieroglyphs

Page 1 of 6

• 1. A forgotten script
• 2. The Rosetta Stone
• 3. The Phenomenon Young
• 4. Jean-François Champollion
• 5. Cracking the code
• 6. Find out more
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A forgotten script

Hieroglyphs dominated the landscape of the Egyptian civilisation. These elaborate symbols were ideal for inscriptions on the walls of majestic temples and monuments, and indeed the Greek word hieroglyphica means 'sacred carvings', but they were too fussy for day-to-day scribbling, so other scripts were evolved in Egypt in parallel. These were the 'hieratic' and 'demotic' scripts, which can crudely be thought of as merely different fonts of the hieroglyphic alphabet.

'The rise of Christianity was responsible for the extinction of Egyptian scripts...'

Then, towards the end of the fourth century AD, within a generation, the Egyptian scripts vanished. The last datable examples of ancient Egyptian writing are found on the island of Philae, where a hieroglyphic temple inscription was carved in AD 394 and where a piece of demotic graffiti has been dated to 450 AD. The rise of Christianity was responsible for the extinction of Egyptian scripts, outlawing their use in order to eradicate any link with Egypt's pagan past.

The ancient scripts were replaced with 'Coptic', a script consisting of 24 letters from the Greek alphabet supplemented by six demotic characters used for Egyptian sounds not expressed in Greek. The ancient Egyptian language continued to be spoken, and evolved into what became known as the Coptic language, but in due course both the Coptic language and script were displaced by the spread of Arabic in the 11th century. The final linguistic link to Egypt's ancient kingdoms was then broken, and the knowledge needed to read the history of the pharaohs was lost.

'They assumed that hieroglyphs were nothing more than primitive picture writing...'

In later centuries, scholars who saw the hieroglyphs tried to interpret them, but they were hindered by a false hypothesis. They assumed that hieroglyphs were nothing more than primitive picture writing, and that their decipherment relied on a literal translation of the images they saw. In fact, the hieroglyphic script and its relatives are phonetic, which is to say that the characters largely represent distinct sounds, just like the letters in the English alphabet. It would take a remarkable discovery before this would be appreciated.

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Published: 2001-10-01