Episode 994
Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts
Fri, 2020-Jan-24 01:15 UTC
Length - 4:16
Direct Link
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The featured article for Friday, 24 January 2020 is Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts.
The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Egyptian writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Later generations' knowledge of these scripts was based on the work of Greek and Roman authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas rather than sounds, and even that hieroglyphs were an esoteric, mystical script rather than a means of recording a spoken language. Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and Renaissance acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.
The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 by members of Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt, bore a parallel text in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. It was hoped that the Egyptian text could be deciphered through its Greek translation, especially in combination with the evidence from Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language. Doing so proved difficult, despite some halting progress made by Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Johan David Åkerblad. Young, building on their work, observed that demotic characters were derived from hieroglyphs and identified several of the phonetic signs in demotic. He also identified the meaning of many hieroglyphs, including phonetic glyphs in a cartouche containing the name of an Egyptian king of foreign origin, Ptolemy. He was convinced, however, that phonetic hieroglyphs were used only in writing non-Egyptian words. In the early 1820s Champollion compared Ptolemy's cartouche with others and ultimately realised the hieroglyphic script was a mixture of phonetic and ideographic elements. His claims were initially met with some scepticism and with accusations that he had taken ideas from Young without giving credit, but they gradually gained acceptance. Champollion went on to roughly identify the meanings of most phonetic hieroglyphs and establish much of the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Egyptian. Young, meanwhile, largely deciphered demotic using the Rosetta Stone in combination with other Greek and demotic parallel texts.
Decipherment efforts languished after Young's death in 1829 and Champollion's in 1831, but in 1837 Karl Richard Lepsius pointed out that many hieroglyphs represented combinations of two or three sounds rather than one, thus correcting one of the most fundamental faults in Champollion's work. Other scholars, such as Emmanuel de Rougé, refined the understanding of Egyptian enough that by the 1850s it was possible to fully translate ancient Egyptian texts. Combined with the decipherment of cuneiform at approximately the same time, their work opened up the once-inaccessible texts from the earliest stages of human history.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:15 UTC on Friday, 24 January 2020.
For the full current version of the article, see Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts on Wikipedia.
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