How the Egyptian writing was decoded

They started in Egypt around 3000 BC and employ pictorial characters to represent objects, people and animals.
How the Egyptian writing was decoded
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The knowledge of writing is not very old compared to human history. It was only invented 5,000 years ago. It is one of the most important human inventions because, without it, it would have been challenging to pass the knowledge from one generation to another. Hieroglyphics is are of the oldest forms of writing.

They started in Egypt around 3000 BC and employ pictorial characters to represent objects, people and animals. Egypt was full of hieroglyphic writing on the walls of temples, palaces and on reams of flat sheets made from the papyrus reed, from which the modern word paper is derived.

However, the priests who knew how to read and write the sacred hieroglyphics had died out by the 4th or 5th century AD, so no one knew what the writings meant. The Persians, Greeks and Romans ruled Egypt at different times, and the hieroglyphics were ignored. Later, Arab travellers tried to decipher the ancient secret hidden in the hieroglyphics but failed.

In fact, the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics remained a mystery until recently. One major reason for these failures was that scholars mistakenly thought that the figures in the writing were all conceptual or symbolic signs. For example, a picture of a hawk represented the concept of swiftness, while that of a crocodile represented evil.  

In 1798, the French general Napoleon Bonaparte led an expedition to Egypt to cut off the lucrative trade routes of the British to India. While the expedition was a military failure, a young French officer, who was bored at his post and was rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta, found a curious stone.

This slab of stone was covered with little figures like other indecipherable writing in Egypt, but the difference was that it had three inscriptions, one of which was in Greek. It was clear that the unknown Hieroglyphics needed to be compared to the known Greek text and deciphered. It sounds simple, but it took more than 20 years.

This stone, which became known as the Rosetta stone, became a sensation in Europe. Copies were circulated and many enthusiasts tried to decipher it. They tried to find repeated words, for example, Ptolemy which occurred 11 times in the Greek text.

The persons who made significant contributions were Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, a prominent French linguist, his student Johan David Åkerblad, a Swedish diplomat and amateur linguist, Thomas Young, a British polymath, and finally, Jean-François Champollion, a French professor, who in 1823 deciphered it.

The breakthrough came with the realisation that the writings were a mix of symbols and alphabets. Since then, British and French scholars have been sparring over how much credit should go to Young and how much to Champollion!

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