The Rosetta Stone, the key to decoding hieroglyphic writing

A long groping in the dark. This is how we could summarize the work on hieroglyphs in the XVII^e and XVIII^e centuries. In defense of the scholars who have looked into the matter, let us specify that the weight of ancient prejudices on the nature of the writing of the ancient Egyptians, considered as composed only of ideograms, was overwhelming. “This Symbolist prejudice denied for fifteen hundred years the fact that hieroglyphic writing contained both ideograms and phonograms, recalls the Egyptologist Simon Thuault, in post-doctorate at the University of Pisa (Italy). However, not identifying this hybrid character made any deciphering impossible. »

So we made a lot of mistakes, but sometimes we added a small piece to the puzzle. Thus, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) gets lost in fanciful attempts to translate ” but he still has a good idea by affirming the relationship between Egyptian and Coptic, the liturgical language of the Christians of Egypt, which he knows”, admits Simon Thuault. The Coptic alphabet is based on the Greek but has seven additional signs, derived from demotic – a cursive form of Egyptian writing – which are used to transcribe typical Egyptian sounds. Likewise, “the Coptic lexicon has a certain percentage of words that come from Greek and others that do notexplains Vanessa Desclaux, in charge of the collection of ancient Egyptian manuscripts at the National Library of France. Why wouldn’t they be words from an older language? » This is the – correct – hypothesis proposed by Kircher.

Neither alphabet nor ideograms alone: ​​hieroglyphs are a hybrid system

The Jesuit, who spent most of his career in Rome, where he could study the engraved obelisks brought back by the Roman emperors, had another good idea, points out Simon Thuault: “He is one of the first to suggest confronting the Egyptian texts directly and not being satisfied with what the classical Greco-Roman authors say. » He will leave himself “beautiful copies of monuments, quite faithful”adds Vanessa Desclaux.

Let’s go to the XVIII^e century to see the following pieces added to the puzzle. Several scholars began to free themselves from the symbolist prejudice and imagined, like the English bishop William Warburton (1698-1779), a possible link between hieroglyphs and an alphabet. Later, the Danish Johan David Akerblad (1763-1819) will push the idea further (and even far too far) by ensuring that the Egyptian writing was only phonetic. From one excess to another…

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