How Egyptian Hieroglyphs Were Deciphered

Our story begins just over 200 years ago, when something big was happening in Europe. The French Revolution had recently sent shockwaves around the world. And now, there was one man's name on everyone's lips. Napoleon had arrived on the sea. And in the year of 1799, Napoleon was in... Egypt. Wait, what? That's right. In order to open up French commerce with India, and to weaken British control of the trade routes, Napoleon had led a force of 40,000 men and had occupied the land of the Nile. And there was something about this invasion that was different from other invasions. And that is that Napoleon took with him a whole scientific expedition. Over 160 engineers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, all kinds of different scholars. And these were not just any scholars, by the way. These were the top thinkers of the day. For example, the famous mathematician Fourier, where we get the Fourier series, was one of many other big names that came along. Napoleon, in doing this, was probably emulating another famous invader of Egypt, Alexander the Great. Alexander had taken with him a retinue of scholars and engineers on all his campaigns. And like Alexander, Napoleon was trying to craft an image of himself as a civilizing conqueror and not a sack-and-plunder type of conqueror. So in Egypt, these members of the French scientific expedition went all over the place making maps, copying down ancient inscriptions, making detailed sketches of all the impressive stuff they saw, and collecting enough statues and other antiquities to fill a museum. But the one thing Napoleon's army found that caused the most excitement was not actually found by the scientists, but by a common soldier. It happened when the British had caught up with Napoleon in Egypt and the French were quickly building a defensive fort at a place called Rashid, aka Rosetta. A soldier noticed that one of the stones being gathered for the building had writing on it. That in itself would not have stopped the French from using it. There are more stones with ancient writing on them scattered around Egypt than in any other country in the world. And unfortunately, people have been reusing these easily-available ancient stones to build new stuff for thousands of years. But this soldier, whose name has unfortunately been lost to history, saw something about this particular stone that made him pause and go fetch the engineering officer, presumably a more educated guy, who came and looked at it and immediately realized that this was something very special. You see, unlike the thousands of other stones with writing on them that the army had encountered all over the place and which nobody knew how to read, this Rosetta stone, as it became known, was divided into three different sections, and each part was written on in a different script. Two of them were in different forms of ancient Egyptian writing, which again, no one could read. One was in hieroglyphics, and another was in a script called demotic, which is kind of like a shorthand-slash-cursive form of hieroglyphics. So one is like this priestly, beautiful, artistic script, and the other is the more bureaucratic script. Knowledge of how to read both of these writing systems had been lost for 1,500 years. But this inscription had a third section, in ancient Greek, and Greek could be read, by many of the French officers, in fact. So the engineering officer looked at it and thought, what if all three sections said the same thing in different languages? This could provide the key to finally reading all the miles of inscriptions adorning the ancient temples and royal tombs of the land. This discovery created a lot of excitement throughout the army, and many officers would come to look at the stone out of curiosity. Soon after, when the French were defeated by the British in Alexandria, the Brits kindly offered to defray the cost of shipping and handling on all those antiquities the French had collected to Europe. After all, the French didn't have any ships, they had just surrendered them. So the Brits were like, look, you guys are going to have enough trouble getting home as it is, so don't worry about the antiquities. We'll take care of them. You're welcome. It was an offer the French couldn't refuse, and so the British Museum acquired a pretty nice Egyptian exhibit. Not bad. Not bad at all. Legend has it that the French general tried to save at least the Rosetta Stone by hiding it under his tent, but the word had already gotten out, and the British were like, hand it over, buddy. Luckily for the French, they had made copies and casts of almost everything. So their scientific material, at least, was intact and made its way back to France. And there, they made an impressive 18-volume work called The Description of Egypt, which was eagerly acquired by all the major universities in Europe. Sparking a kind of Egyptomania across the continent. And as soon as copies of this Rosetta Stone started to circulate around Europe, there was a lot of excitement about that too, and it sparked a race to decipher the lost scripts. At first, it looked like a British scholar named Thomas Young was going to be the one to crack the code, which would be like adding insult to injury for the French, who had lost the war by this point, Napoleon was exiled, and the British had taken the actual Rosetta Stone. So this guy, Thomas Young, and by the way, for any science buffs out there, this is the famous physicist Thomas Young who demonstrated that light is a wave. So what Young had realized was that in all the places where in the Greek text there was a royal name, and that's Ptolemy, the Greek king of Egypt, in the equivalent spots in the Egyptian hieroglyphic text, the symbols were circled, surrounded by a figure called a cartouche. So based on the hypothesis, which later proved correct, that the circled symbols were royal names, and in this case the name was Ptolemy, or in Greek, Ptolemaios, Young was able to get a few sound values for a few symbols, and he made some important inferences about how this script actually works to express words and sounds. Now that still won't let you suddenly read the whole language, but it was a big breakthrough, and it seemed like only a matter of time before the Brits would achieve their triple crown, winning the war, getting the stone, and deciphering it too. And this was very much a matter of national pride for both sides. However, in France, a young man named Jean-François Champollion had been working on the decipherment for some time on his own, somewhat secretively. He had already come to a few similar conclusions as Young had when he received a probably over-sensationalized report about Young's breakthrough. Needless to say, Champollion was shocked and devastated by the news. All this hard work and for nothing. Soon after, however, he received more accurate information, that while some sounds for different symbols had been plausibly decoded, the language itself was still unreadable. Champollion took heart again and doubled his efforts, working day and night relentlessly on his goal. And well, he did achieve his goal and was the first to actually read the full Egyptian text, and he did get the credit and the honor and the glory for it. If you go today to his hometown of Figeac in southern France, you'll see a monument to his honor in the form of an enormous Rosetta Stone replica filling a large courtyard. So the British may have kept the original, but the French did get their comeback. But why did Champollion succeed where others didn't? In other words, of all the very smart people across Europe who were racing to decode the script, why was Champollion the first? Was it inspiration? Or perspiration? Or did luck play a role? Actually, to his credit, Champollion did something that no one else in this race did. And that is, he took the trouble to learn a language called Coptic, which was the language of the Christians of Egypt. You see, after the Muslim-Arab conquest back in the 7th century, part of the population of Egypt had remained Christian and had kept their own language, which descends from ancient Egyptian. In fact, Egypt is still about 10% Coptic Christian, little known fact, but they mainly speak Arabic now. Anyway, Champollion was the only one in this race who realized the essential value of this one surviving and known Egyptian language, and he put in the long hours of learning it. And ultimately, that's gotta be one of the main things that set him apart from the rest. And so he truly does deserve the fame that he has. The decipherment of ancient Egyptian opened up a whole world of new texts that could be read for the first time in over one and a half millennia. And of the various modern decipherment stories of ancient texts, this is by far the most famous. But it didn't fundamentally change our view of history. People already knew Egypt was super ancient. They already knew about most of the dynasties of the pharaohs from Greek sources. So we already had at least a very bare outline. But this amazing accomplishment of Champollion allowed us to add flesh and blood to the bare bones that were there. And the thing about Egypt is that it's the most continuous of all ancient civilizations. Pretty much anywhere else, you get occasional dark ages where there's no written records, and then periods of high culture, and then chaos again. But in Egypt, you can find a continuous supply of monuments, temples, tombs with writing on them stretching back to 3000 BC with pretty much no major interruption. That allows Egyptologists to construct a continuous timeline from 3000 BC to the beginning of the Common Era. You can't do that for any other ancient civilization. And so to this day, our chronology of the ancient world in general before the classical period is largely based on Egyptian records. And whenever we discover a new ancient city and we want to know when it flourished, one of the ways to do that is to see if there's any contact with Egypt. Any Egyptian artifacts there or mentions of the city in Egyptian sources. And then using the Egyptian timeline, which we do know more or less, we use that to date other civilizations. And that is why Champollion's discovery was a big deal and formed one of the cornerstones of our modern understanding of ancient history.