Scope: This lecture has three distinct goals: (1) The student will learn why the Rosetta stone was the key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian language. (2) The student will learn the four different scripts in which ancient Egyptian was written (hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, and Coptic). (3) The student will see the three different ways that hieroglyphic signs could be used.
Outline
I. Ancient Egyptian was a dead language.
A. Because Egypt had long been occupied by foreigners, including the Greeks and Romans, the ancient written language had expired. It remained dead for over 1,000 years.
B. The central assumption was that the ancient language was ideographic, not alphabetic. But this was wrong. The ancient Greek writer Horapollo correctly asserted that the mysterious symbols represented something other than what they depicted, although he was wrong in other matters.
II. The Rosetta stone was the key to decipherment.
A. The stone was found in the foundations of a fort at Rosetta and is stela- shaped, like a tombstone. Stelae were carved stones with inscriptions that were placed like bulletin boards in front of temples.
B. The stone contained three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek) but only two languages (Greek and Egyptian).
1. The hieroglyphic script was used for sacred texts.
2. More efficient than hieroglyphs, demotic was a script the people wrote.
3. Greek, the third script, was the language of the rulers of Egypt during the period that the stone was composed. The significance of its appearance on the stone was realized immediately through the last line: “Written in sacred and native and Greek characters.”
4. Hieratic was not on the Rosetta stone but was a cursive, shorthand form of hieroglyphs.
5. Coptic, an ancient form of Egyptian spelled out in the Greek alphabet, was not on the Rosetta stone either but was instrumental in deciphering it.
C. The Rosetta stone was taken by the British in 1801. Contrary to popular belief, it is reddish granite, not black basalt.
D. The stone’s decipherment was the product of several minds.
1. Thomas Young, an English physician, correctly concluded that the sign for “Ptolemy,” for example, was phonetic—that an alphabet, not an ideogram, was at work.
2. Jean Francois Champoilion, a Frenchman who knew Coptic, translated the message in 1822 through his knowledge of ancient Egyptian sounds. Coptic, then, proved to be our connection with spoken ancient Egyptian.
III. The ancient Egyptian language works on several levels.
A. There are several kinds of hieroglyphs.
1. Hieroglyphs can be phonetic, like our alphabet. In ancient Egyptian, a rectangle represents a p; a hand represents a d. As in many ancient languages, there were no vowels.
2. Determinatives clarify the meaning of such phonetic words. They are placed at the end of a word as an ideographic reminder.
3. Ideograms, or pictorial writing, represent concepts. These images were a shorthand version of hieroglyphs.
B. Hieroglyphs could be written left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. For purposes of symmetry, which the Egyptians admired, the language was thus very flexible.
C. You can easily write your own name in hieroglyphs through transliteration.
Essential Reading:
Stephen Quirke and Carol Andrews, The Rosetta Stone.
Supplementary Reading:
Mark Collier and Bill Manley, How to Read Hieroglyphs.
Questions to Consider:
1. What three scripts are on the Rosetta stone?
2. Why did ancient Egyptian become a dead language?