Cracking Hieroglyphs: Champollion’s Breakthrough, 1822
Explore the linguistic detective work that made Egyptian hieroglyphs readable. Connect the Rosetta Stone, Thomas Young’s contributions, and Champollion’s 1822 announcement while distinguishing the ancient inscription from its modern decipherment.
Connections9
Lettre à M. Dacier: people, places, and context for the episode.
Lettre à M. Dacier is a letter sent in 1822 by the Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
Ptolemy V Epiphanes: people, places, and context for the episode.
Ptolemy V Epiphanes Eucharistus was the King of Ptolemaic Egypt from July or August 204 BC until his death in 180 BC.
Cartouche: people, places, and context for the episode.
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name.
Coptic language: people, places, and context for the episode.
Coptic is a dormant Afroasiatic language. It is a group of closely related Egyptian dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Egyptian language, and historically spoken by the Egyptians, starting from the third century AD in Roman Egypt.
Demotic Egyptian script: people, places, and context for the episode.
Demotic is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts.
Egyptian hieroglyphs: people, places, and context for the episode.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or hieroglyphics were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood.
Thomas Young (scientist): people, places, and context for the episode.
Thomas Young was a British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. He was instrumental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.
Jean-François Champollion: people, places, and context for the episode.
Jean-François Champollion, also known as Champollion le jeune, was a French philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology.
Rosetta Stone: people, places, and context for the episode.
The Rosetta Stone is a stele of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes.