Today, September 27, 1822, Francois Champollion decoded the hieroglyphics
For several thousand years the language of ancient Egypt remained one of the greatest mysteries. Yet within it was hidden the history of a thousand-year-old civilization, one of the most important and decisive of our human and cultural heritage.
It was the French archaeologist Jean-Francois Champollion who discovered the exact key to decipher the hieroglyphs, a term that the Egyptians used to identify a sacred engraving.
The use of this type of writing was reserved for monuments or any objects, such as steles and statues, designed to be eternal; the current and daily writing in Egypt was hieratic. Champollion's was a more than brilliant intuition and we find it contained in the Letter to M. Dacier, exposed for the first time at Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Paris, on 27 September 1822, exactly 200 years ago. Fundamental to this magnificent work was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the slab bearing the decree of Memphis, promulgated on 27 March 196 B.C. by the priests of the temple of Ptah to celebrate the anniversary of the accession to the throne of Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphane, which occurred the previous year.
The decree in question reported the benefits brought to the country by the sovereign, the taxes that had been repealed by him and the privileges, especially of an economic nature, that the priests of the temple had received from the pharaoh.
A slab measuring 114x72 cm, weighing 760 kg, now preserved in the British Museum of London, bearing an inscription with three different spellings: hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek.
Champollion knew nine ancient languages perfectly (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, Coptic, Persian and Sanskrit) and, after careful comparisons with other texts, had an extraordinary intuition that brought the great Egyptian civilization back to light. Intuition that allowed him to recognize hieroglyphics as a complex system of figurative, symbolic and phonetic writing.
Through a copy of the Stele, he drew conclusions that disproved those past theories that considered hieroglyphics to be a merely figurative type of writing. Rather, he managed to demonstrate the opposite by discovering the phonetic value of the symbols and two years later he expanded on the discovery in the Précis du Système hiéroglyphique.
Champollion conceived that each ideogram could contain one or more phonetic sounds in a single character. Hieroglyphic writing consists of 24 main characters (symbols for a single phoneme), to which are added many more biconsonant signs (symbols for two phonemes combined). There are also triconsonant signs (three phonemes), although they are less common than the others.
In total, hieroglyphic writing consists of more than 6,900 characters, including groupings and variants.
