Decipherment of hieroglyphic writing

Until recently, the decipherment of hieroglyphs was hampered because those attempting to decipher the hieroglyphs assigned emotional meanings to the actual symbols used. For example, some people believed that the hieroglyph for "son", a goose, was chosen because geese love their sons above all other animals. This hieroglyph was chosen, though, simply because the word for goose once had the same sound as the word for "son". A further impediment was the lack of complementary material, that is to say material of the same work written in close proximity to another translation.

The first known attempts at deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs were made by Arab historians in medieval Egypt during the 9th and 10th centuries. By then, hieroglyphs had long been forgotten in Egypt, and were replaced by the Coptic and Arabic alphabets. Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya were the first historians to be able to at least partly decipher what was written in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, [Dr. Okasha El Daly (2005), "Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings", UCL Press, ISBN 1844720632. (cf. [http://www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=481 Arabic Study of Ancient Egypt] , Foundation for Science Technology and Civilisation.)] by relating them to the contemporary Coptic language used by Coptic priests in their time. Arabic manuscripts of Ibn Wahshiyya's work was later read by Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century, and then translated and published in English by Joseph Hammer in 1806 as "Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained; with an Account of the Egyptian Priests, their Classes, Initiation, and Sacrifices in the Arabic Language by Ahmad Bin Abubekr Bin Wahishih", contributing to the complete decipherment of hieroglyphs.Dr. Okasha El Daly, [http://muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=712 Deciphering Egyptian Hieroglyphs in Muslim Heritage] , Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.]

The study of hieroglyphs continued centuries later, when various modern scholars attempted to decipher the glyphs, notably Johannes Goropius Becanus in the 16th century, Athanasius Kircher in the 17th, and Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Åkerblad and Thomas Young in the early 19th century, each making one important step toward the solution but failing to find it.

Athanasius Kircher, a student of Coptic and Arabic, had read Ibn Wahshiyya's work in the 17th century and continued the study of hieroglyphs from where Ibn Wahshiyya had left off. Kircher further developed the notion that the last stage of Egyptian could be related to the earlier Egyptian stages. Because he was not able to transliterate or translate hieroglyphs, however, he could not prove this notion.

In 1799 when the discovery of the Rosetta Stone occurred, scholars finally had an example of hieroglyphic demotic and Ancient Greek that they were all reasonably certain were the translations of the same passage. In hieroglyphic, the name of the King or Pharaoh and gods' names are often placed within a circle called a cartouche. The discovery in 1799 of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops (during ) provided the critical information which allowed Jean-François Champollion to discover the nature of the script by the 1820s::"It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word" [Jean-François Champollion, Letter to M. Dacier, September 271822]

Champollion, a young French scholar, demonstrated how the name "Kleopatra" could be made in hieroglyphic. Furthermore, by using an impressive knowledge of Coptic he surmised that a number of symbols showing everyday objects could be pronounced as in Coptic.

Applying this knowledge to other, well-known hieroglyphic sources clearly confirmed Champollion's work and linguistic scholars now had a way to work with and delineate the language into nouns, verbs, prepositions and other grammatical parts.

In the fifth century appeared the "Hieroglyphica" of Horapollo, a spurious explanation of almost 200 glyphs. Authoritative yet largely false, the work was a lasting impediment to the decipherment of Egyptian writing. But whereas earlier scholarship emphasized Greek origin of the document, more recent work has recognized remnants of genuine knowledge, and casts it as an attempt by an Egyptian intellectual to rescue an unrecoverable past. The "Hieroglyphica" was a major influence on Renaissance symbolism, particularly the emblem book of Andrea Alciato, and including the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" of Francesco Colonna.

References