A stone, not a key
The Rosetta Stone is often described as the object that “cracked” Egyptian hieroglyphs. The reality is more interesting. The stone was an important starting point, and it supplied a text that scholars could compare across three scripts, but it did not by itself allow anyone to read Egyptian. It took more than two decades of work by several scholars, and further inscriptions, before hieroglyphic writing was understood in the 1820s.
Discovery and what the stone says
French soldiers serving in Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the stone in July 1799 while strengthening a fort near the town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, in the Nile Delta. Scholars attached to the expedition recognised its importance at once and had copies made. After the French defeat in Egypt, the stone passed to the British under the terms of the surrender in 1801, and it has been in the British Museum since 1802. Egypt has in recent years asked for it to be returned, and the issue remains a matter of public discussion.
The stone is a broken slab of dark granodiorite carrying a decree issued by a council of priests at Memphis in 196 BCE, during the reign of Ptolemy V of the Ptolemaic dynasty. The decree honours the king and lists the tax relief and benefits he gave the temples, and it orders that copies be set up in temples. It is not a literary work or a historical narrative, but a routine though politically significant text.
The same text is written three times:
- in hieroglyphs, the formal script of religious and royal inscriptions;
- in Demotic, a cursive script used in everyday administration at that time;
- in Greek, the language of the Ptolemaic government.
Since Greek was well understood, scholars knew roughly what the other two texts must say. Because the stone is damaged, especially at the top, part of the hieroglyphic text is missing, and the surviving parts did not match the Greek line by line.
The first steps
Early work focused on the Demotic section. The French orientalist Silvestre de Sacy and the Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad identified some of the Demotic groups of signs that matched proper names in the Greek, and Åkerblad proposed values for several letters. This was useful but led nowhere further at first, since Demotic was not yet understood as a whole.
The English polymath Thomas Young then made progress in the 1810s. He saw that the oval rings, known as cartouches, in the hieroglyphic text enclosed royal names, and that the name Ptolemy, which appears in the Greek, could be matched to one such cartouche. He assigned plausible sound values to some of the signs and showed that the Demotic and hieroglyphic scripts were connected. However, Young still believed that most hieroglyphs represented ideas instead of sounds.
Champollion’s breakthrough
Jean-François Champollion, a French scholar who had studied many ancient languages from youth, was convinced that Coptic, the final stage of the Egyptian language written in Greek letters, preserved the spoken language of the pharaohs. This turned out to be the crucial insight. If hieroglyphs recorded Egyptian speech, Coptic could supply the words.
Champollion compared the Ptolemy cartouche on the Rosetta Stone with the name of Cleopatra, which was found on an obelisk from Philae, in Egypt, that had a Greek inscription alongside. The shared letters in the two names had the same signs, supporting phonetic readings. He then turned to cartouches from older temples, including Abu Simbel, where signs, together with Coptic words, allowed him to read the names of pharaohs such as Ramesses and Thutmose. This showed that the same script had been used to write names a thousand years before the Ptolemies.
In 1822 he announced his results in a letter to a colleague, now known as the Lettre à M. Dacier. His central conclusion was that Egyptian writing was a mixed system, in which some signs represent sounds and others represent whole words or serve as classifiers that indicate meaning. A full grammar and dictionary were prepared but published only after his early death in 1832.
The question of how much credit belongs to Young and how much to Champollion was a source of rivalry at the time, and historians still describe the contributions differently. It is safest to say that Young made real early advances and Champollion produced the first consistent system that scholars could use to read texts.
What decipherment means
Decipherment is more than finding a translation of a few lines. It requires establishing the language behind the script, the values of the signs, and a method that can be tested on new material. Champollion’s system was validated as other scholars used it to read many further inscriptions and papyri. Over the following decades Egyptology grew into a field in its own right, built on texts that had been unreadable for well over a thousand years. The structure of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script itself, with its sound signs and determinatives, is a separate subject.
Other decipherments
The Rosetta Stone model of using a bilingual or trilingual text has helped elsewhere, but not always. Cuneiform decipherment in the nineteenth century relied heavily on the multilingual royal inscription at Behistun in Iran. Hittite decipherment depended on recognising that the language was Indo-European, and was announced in 1915 by Bedrich Hrozny. Maya glyph decipherment was a gradual, collaborative process involving calendar studies, phonetic signs and comparison with living Mayan languages. Some scripts, such as the Linear A script of Bronze Age Crete, remain unread because there is no bilingual text, and the language it records is not known.
The lesson of Rosetta is therefore that a single inscription can open a path, but understanding also requires knowledge of the language, many examples and a careful, testable method.