A script nobody could read
Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts stopped being understood by around the fourth or fifth century AD, as the Coptic alphabet, written in Greek-derived letters, replaced them as the language’s living script. What knowledge survived afterward came largely through Greek and Roman writers, whose accounts wrongly assumed hieroglyphs were a purely symbolic or ideographic system, each sign standing directly for an idea rather than a sound, an assumption that shaped and misdirected scholarly attempts at decipherment for well over a thousand years. The claim that eventually replaced this assumption was specific: that hieroglyphic writing was, throughout its history and not only in some late or foreign-influenced period, a mixed system combining phonetic signs representing sounds with symbolic and ideographic ones, used together within the same text and even the same word.
One stone, three scripts
The breakthrough object was the Rosetta Stone, a stela discovered by French soldiers near Rosetta in 1799, which carried a single decree, issued in 197 BC by Ptolemy V granting favours to Egypt’s priesthoods, written out three times in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek script. Because the Greek text could already be read, it offered something decipherment attempts had previously lacked: a known translation to check candidate readings of the hieroglyphic and demotic sections against, even though much of the hieroglyphic portion itself was damaged. Early scholars including Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Johan David Åkerblad made limited progress from 1802 onward, managing to identify a small number of proper names, including Ptolemy and Alexander, within the demotic text using this comparative method.
Young’s partial key
Thomas Young, a British polymath, took the decisive next step from 1814, recognising that hieroglyphic and demotic signs were related to each other and reasoning that there were too few distinct hieroglyphic signs for each one to represent a whole word, which implied some signs had to represent sounds instead. He focused on cartouches, the oval rings enclosing royal names in hieroglyphic text, correctly guessing that names of foreign rulers within them were spelled phonetically, and published his findings anonymously in an 1819 Encyclopaedia Britannica supplement, correlating roughly eighty hieroglyphic signs with demotic equivalents and correctly identifying six phonetic values outright. His limitation was assuming that only foreign names, belonging to non-Egyptian rulers like the Ptolemies, needed spelling out phonetically at all.
Champollion’s cartouche comparison
Jean-François Champollion, trained since childhood in Coptic and several Near Eastern languages, approached the same cartouches with a different comparison in mind. Using copies of the cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra taken from the Philae Obelisk, supplied by the collector William John Bankes, he matched the phonetic values that the two different names shared, isolating individual sounds including p, l, o, e and t and establishing that different signs could represent the same sound, a phenomenon called homophony. This was a genuine advance on Young’s work, since it built a working phonetic alphabet rather than a handful of separately guessed values, but it remained, at this stage, consistent with Young’s assumption that phonetic spelling in cartouches was a feature specific to foreign rulers’ names rather than a general property of the script.
Ramesses, and the case closed
The claim that ended that assumption came on 14 September 1822, when Champollion, examining copies of temple inscriptions made by Jean-Nicolas Huyot, recognised a cartouche combining the hieroglyphic sign for the sun, read in Coptic as re, with signs for the sounds m and s, spelling out Ramesses, the name of a native Egyptian pharaoh with no connection to Greek or Roman rule. Because this name predated any foreign influence on Egypt, its phonetic spelling proved that Egyptians had used phonetic signs for their own native rulers’ names, not only for imported Greek ones, meaning the entire script combined phonetic and symbolic elements throughout its history rather than only in a late, foreign-influenced period. Champollion announced this conclusion within days, in his Lettre à M. Dacier, completed 22 September and read to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on 27 September 1822.
A credit dispute that outlasted both men
The dispute this triggered, and the errors left unresolved even after it, are as much part of the story as the breakthrough itself. Young, who attended the reading of Champollion’s letter, initially responded generously, remarking that even if Champollion had borrowed an English key, the lock had been so rusty that no ordinary effort could have turned it, but he grew increasingly resentful of receiving only passing credit in Champollion’s later publications, and the two men’s rival claims were never fully reconciled in their lifetimes. Champollion’s own system, meanwhile, still contained real errors: he did not recognise that some signs represented two or three consonants rather than one, an issue only properly explained by Karl Richard Lepsius in 1837, whose corrections brought the working alphabet close to the twenty-four uniliteral signs recognised today. Reading this history rewards anyone willing to sit with an achievement that was real, disputed and still imperfect all at once.