Editing Rosetta Stone (section)

==Reading the Rosetta Stone==
{{For|more information|Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts}}

Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its eventual decipherment, the ancient [[Egyptian language]] and script had not been understood since shortly before the [[Fall of the Western Roman Empire|fall of the Roman Empire]]. The usage of the [[Egyptian hieroglyphs|hieroglyphic script]] had become increasingly specialised even in the later [[Ancient Egypt|Pharaonic period]]; by the [[4th century]] AD, few Egyptians were capable of reading them. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased as [[decline of ancient Egyptian religion|temple priesthoods died out and Egypt was converted to Christianity]]; the last known inscription is dated to {{Nowrap|24 August 394}}, found at [[Philae]] and known as the [[Graffito of Esmet-Akhom]].<ref name="Ray11">[[#Ray69|Ray (2007)]] p.&nbsp;11</ref> The last demotic text, also from Philae, was written in 452.<ref>[[#Iversen|Iversen (1993)]] p.&nbsp;30</ref>

Hieroglyphs retained their pictorial appearance, and classical authors emphasised this aspect, in sharp contrast to the [[Greek alphabet|Greek]] and [[Latin alphabet|Roman alphabets]]. In the [[5th century]], the priest [[Horapollo]] wrote ''Hieroglyphica'', an explanation of almost 200 [[glyph]]s. His work was believed to be authoritative, yet it was misleading in many ways, and this and other works were a lasting impediment to the understanding of Egyptian writing.<ref name="Cracking1516">[[#Parkinson69|Parkinson et al. (1999)]] pp.&nbsp;15–16</ref> Later attempts at decipherment were made by [[List of Muslim historians|Arab historians]] in [[Egypt in the Middle Ages|medieval Egypt]] during the 9th and 10th centuries. [[Dhul-Nun al-Misri]] and [[Ibn Wahshiyya]] were the first historians to study hieroglyphs, by comparing them to the contemporary [[Coptic language]] used by [[Copts|Coptic]] priests in their time.<ref>[[#Eldaly05|El Daly (2005)]] pp.&nbsp;65–75</ref><ref name="Ray15">[[#Ray69|Ray (2007)]] pp.&nbsp;15–18</ref> The study of hieroglyphs continued with fruitless attempts at decipherment by European scholars, notably [[Pierius Valerianus]] in the 16th century<ref>[[#Iversen|Iversen (1993)]] pp.&nbsp;70–72</ref> and [[Athanasius Kircher]] in the 17th.<ref name="Ray20">[[#Ray69|Ray (2007)]] pp.&nbsp;20–24</ref> The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided critical missing information, gradually revealed by a succession of scholars, that eventually allowed [[Jean-François Champollion]] to solve the puzzle that [[Athanasius Kircher|Kircher]] had called the [[Sphinx#Riddle of the Sphinx|riddle of the Sphinx]].<ref>{{cite book|last1=Powell|first1=Barry B.|title=Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|isbn=978-1-4051-6256-2|page=91|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=b6Gx-MwHvaoC&pg=PA91|language=en|year=2009}}</ref>

{{Anchor|The Greek text}}

===Greek text===
[[File:Porson 13 Jan 1803.jpg|thumb|alt="Illustration depicting the rounded-off lower-right edge of the Rosetta Stone, showing Richard Porson's suggested reconstruction of the missing Greek text"|upright=1.5|[[Richard Porson]]'s suggested reconstruction of the missing Greek text (1803)]]

The [[Ancient Greek|Greek]] text on the Rosetta Stone provided the starting point. Ancient Greek was widely known to scholars, but they were not familiar with details of its use in the [[Koine Greek|Hellenistic]] period as a government language in Ptolemaic Egypt; large-scale discoveries of Greek [[papyrus|papyri]] were a long way in the future. Thus, the earliest translations of the Greek text of the stone show the translators still struggling with the historical context and with administrative and religious jargon. [[Stephen Weston (antiquary)|Stephen Weston]] verbally presented an English translation of the Greek text at a [[Society of Antiquaries of London|Society of Antiquaries]] meeting in April 1802.<ref name="Budge133">[[#Budge69|Budge (1913)]] p.&nbsp;1</ref><ref name="Andrews13">[[#Andrews69|Andrews (1985)]] p.&nbsp;13</ref>

Meanwhile, two of the lithographic copies made in Egypt had reached the [[Institut de France]] in Paris in 1801. There, librarian and antiquarian [[Gabriel de La Porte du Theil]] set to work on a translation of the Greek, but he was dispatched elsewhere on Napoleon's orders almost immediately, and he left his unfinished work in the hands of colleague [[Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon]]. Ameilhon produced the first published translations of the Greek text in 1803, in both [[Latin]] and French to ensure that they would circulate widely.{{Cref2|H}} At [[Cambridge]], [[Richard Porson]] worked on the missing lower right corner of the Greek text. He produced a skilful suggested reconstruction, which was soon being circulated by the Society of Antiquaries alongside its prints of the inscription. At almost the same moment, [[Christian Gottlob Heyne]] in [[Göttingen]] was making a new Latin translation of the Greek text that was more reliable than Ameilhon's and was first published in 1803.{{Cref2|G}} It was reprinted by the Society of Antiquaries in a special issue of its journal ''Archaeologia'' in 1811, alongside Weston's previously unpublished English translation, [[Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner|Colonel Turner's]] narrative, and other documents.{{Cref2|H}}<ref>[[#Budge70|Budge (1904)]] pp.&nbsp;27–28</ref><ref name="Cracking22">[[#Parkinson69|Parkinson et al. (1999)]] p.&nbsp;22</ref>

{{Anchor|The Demotic text}}

===Demotic text===
At the time of the stone's discovery, Swedish diplomat and scholar [[Johan David Åkerblad]] was working on a little-known script of which some examples had recently been found in Egypt, which came to be known as [[Demotic (Egyptian)|Demotic]]. He called it "cursive Coptic" because he was convinced that it was used to record some form of the [[Coptic language]] (the direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian), although it had few similarities with the later [[Coptic alphabet|Coptic script]]. French Orientalist [[Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy|Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy]] had been discussing this work with Åkerblad when, in 1801, he received one of the early lithographic prints of the Rosetta Stone, from [[Jean-Antoine Chaptal]], French minister of the interior. He realised that the middle text was in this same script. He and Åkerblad set to work, both focusing on the middle text and assuming that the script was alphabetical. They attempted to identify the points where Greek names ought to occur within this unknown text, by comparing it with the Greek. In 1802, Silvestre de Sacy reported to Chaptal that he had successfully identified five names ("''[[Alexander the Great|Alexandros]]''", "''[[Alexandria|Alexandreia]]''", "''[[Ptolemy V Epiphanes|Ptolemaios]]''", "''[[Arsinoe III of Egypt|Arsinoe]]''", and Ptolemy's title "''Epiphanes''"),{{Cref2|C}} while Åkerblad published an alphabet of 29 letters (more than half of which were correct) that he had identified from the Greek names in the Demotic text.{{Cref2|D}}<ref name="Budge133"/> They could not, however, identify the remaining characters in the Demotic text, which, as is now known, included [[ideogram|ideographic]] and other symbols alongside the phonetic ones.<ref>[[#Robinson09|Robinson (2009)]] pp.&nbsp;59–61</ref>

<gallery widths="200" heights="200" mode="packed">
File:Akerblad.jpg|alt=Illustration depicting two columns of Demotic text and their Greek equivalent, as devised by Johan David Åkerblad in 1802|[[Johan David Åkerblad]]'s table of Demotic phonetic characters and their [[Coptic alphabet|Coptic]] equivalents (1802)
File:DemoticScriptsRosettaStoneReplica.jpg|Replica of the Demotic texts
</gallery>

{{Anchor|The hieroglyphic text}}

===Hieroglyphic text===
[[File:Champollion table.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|alt=A page containing three columns of characters, the first column depicting characters in Greek and the second and third columns showing their equivalents in demotic and in hieroglyphs respectively|[[Jean-François Champollion|Champollion]]'s table of hieroglyphic phonetic characters with their demotic and Coptic equivalents (1822)]]

Silvestre de Sacy eventually gave up work on the stone, but he was to make another contribution. In 1811, prompted by discussions with a Chinese student about [[Chinese character|Chinese script]], Silvestre de Sacy considered a suggestion made by [[Jörgen Zoega|Georg Zoëga]] in 1797 that the foreign names in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions might be written phonetically; he also recalled that as early as 1761, [[Jean-Jacques Barthélemy]] had suggested that the characters enclosed in [[cartouche]]s in hieroglyphic inscriptions were proper names. Thus, when [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]], foreign secretary of the [[Royal Society|Royal Society of London]], wrote to him about the stone in 1814, Silvestre de Sacy suggested in reply that in attempting to read the hieroglyphic text, Young might look for cartouches that ought to contain Greek names and try to identify phonetic characters in them.<ref>[[#Robinson09|Robinson (2009)]] p.&nbsp;61</ref>

Young did so, with two results that together paved the way for the final decipherment. In the hieroglyphic text, he discovered the phonetic characters "{{Transliteration|egy|p t o l m e s}}" (in today's transliteration "{{Transliteration|egy|p t w l m y s}}") that were used to write the Greek name "{{Transliteration|grc|Ptolemaios}}". He also noticed that these characters resembled the equivalent ones in the demotic script, and went on to note as many as 80 similarities between the hieroglyphic and demotic texts on the stone, an important discovery because the two scripts were previously thought to be entirely different from one another. This led him to deduce correctly that the demotic script was only partly phonetic, also consisting of ideographic characters derived from hieroglyphs.{{Cref2|I}} Young's new insights were prominent in the long article "Egypt" that he contributed to the {{lang|la-GB|[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]}} in 1819.{{Cref2|J}} He could make no further progress, however.<ref>[[#Robinson09|Robinson (2009)]] pp.&nbsp;61–64</ref>

In 1814, Young first exchanged correspondence about the stone with [[Jean-François Champollion]], a teacher at [[Grenoble]] who had produced a scholarly work on ancient Egypt. Champollion saw copies of the brief hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions of the [[Philae obelisk]] in 1822, on which [[William John Bankes]] had tentatively noted the names "{{Transliteration|grc|Ptolemaios}}" and "{{Transliteration|grc|Kleopatra}}" in both languages.<ref>[[#Parkinson69|Parkinson et al. (1999)]] p.&nbsp;32</ref> From this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters {{Transliteration|egy|k l e o p a t r a}} (in today's transliteration {{Transliteration|egy|q l i҆ w p 3 d r 3.t}}).<ref name="Budge136">[[#Budge69|Budge (1913)]] pp.&nbsp;3–6</ref> On the basis of this and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters, completing his work on 14 September and announcing it publicly on 27 September in a lecture to the {{lang|fr|[[Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres|Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres]]}}.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Hr3wCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA97 |pages=98–99 |title=The Reality of the Unobservable: Observability, Unobservability and Their Impact on the Issue of Scientific Realism |author1=E. Agazzi |author2=M. Pauri |publisher=Springer Science & Business Media |year=2013|isbn=978-94-015-9391-5 }}</ref> On the same day he wrote the famous "{{lang|fr|[[Lettre à M. Dacier]]}}" to [[Bon-Joseph Dacier]], secretary of the Académie, detailing his discovery.{{Cref2|K}} In the postscript Champollion notes that similar phonetic characters seemed to occur in both Greek and Egyptian names, a hypothesis confirmed in 1823, when he identified the names of pharaohs [[Ramesses I|Ramesses]] and [[Thutmose I|Thutmose]] written in cartouches at [[Abu Simbel temples|Abu Simbel]]. These far older hieroglyphic inscriptions had been copied by Bankes and sent to Champollion by [[Jean-Nicolas Huyot]].{{Cref2|M}} From this point, the stories of the Rosetta Stone and the [[decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs]] diverge, as Champollion drew on many other texts to develop an Ancient Egyptian grammar and a hieroglyphic dictionary which were published after his death in 1832.<ref>[[#Dewachter90|Dewachter (1990)]] p.&nbsp;45</ref>

===Later work===
[[File:Copy of Rosetta Stone.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|alt="Replica of the Rosetta Stone in the King's Library of the British Museum as it would have appeared to 19th century visitors, open to the air, held in a cradle that is at a slight angle from the horizontal and available to touch"|Replica of the Rosetta Stone, displayed as the original used to be, available to touch, in what was the [[King's Library]] of the British Museum, now the Enlightenment Gallery]]
Work on the stone now focused on fuller understanding of the texts and their contexts by comparing the three versions with one another. In 1824 Classical scholar [[Jean Antoine Letronne|Antoine-Jean Letronne]] promised to prepare a new literal translation of the Greek text for Champollion's use. Champollion in return promised an analysis of all the points at which the three texts seemed to differ. Following Champollion's sudden death in 1832, his draft of this analysis could not be found, and Letronne's work stalled. [[Francesco Salvolini|François Salvolini]], Champollion's former student and assistant, died in 1838, and this analysis and other missing drafts were found among his papers. This discovery incidentally demonstrated that Salvolini's own publication on the stone, published in 1837, was [[plagiarism]].{{Cref2|O}} Letronne was at last able to complete his commentary on the Greek text and his new French translation of it, which appeared in 1841.{{Cref2|P}} During the early 1850s, German Egyptologists [[Heinrich Karl Brugsch|Heinrich Brugsch]] and [[Max Uhlemann]] produced revised Latin translations based on the demotic and hieroglyphic texts.{{Cref2|Q}}{{Cref2|R}} The first English translation followed in 1858, the work of three members of the [[Philomathean Society]] at the [[University of Pennsylvania]].{{Cref2|S}}

Whether one of the three texts was the standard version, from which the other two were originally translated, is a question that has remained controversial. Letronne attempted to show in 1841 that the Greek version, the product of the Egyptian government under the Macedonian [[Ptolemies]], was the original.{{Cref2|P}} Among recent authors, John Ray has stated that "the hieroglyphs were the most important of the scripts on the stone: they were there for the gods to read, and the more learned of their priesthood".<ref name="Ray3"/> Philippe Derchain and Heinz Josef Thissen have argued that all three versions were composed simultaneously, while Stephen Quirke sees in the decree "an intricate coalescence of three vital textual traditions".<ref>[[#Quirke69|Quirke and Andrews (1989)]] p.&nbsp;10</ref> [[Richard B. Parkinson|Richard Parkinson]] points out that the hieroglyphic version strays from archaic formalism and occasionally lapses into language closer to that of the demotic register that the priests more commonly used in everyday life.<ref name="focus13">[[#Parkinson70|Parkinson (2005)]] p.&nbsp;13</ref> The fact that the three versions cannot be matched word for word helps to explain why the decipherment has been more difficult than originally expected, especially for those original scholars who were expecting an exact bilingual key to Egyptian hieroglyphs.<ref name="Cracking3031">[[#Parkinson69|Parkinson et al. (1999)]] pp.&nbsp;30–31</ref>

===Rivalries===
[[File:Place des ecritures Figeac.jpg|thumb|upright=1.6|alt=Photo depicting a large copy of the Rosetta Stone filling an interior courtyard of a building in Figeac, France|A giant copy of the Rosetta Stone by [[Joseph Kosuth]] in [[Figeac]], France, the birthplace of [[Jean-François Champollion]]]]

Even before the Salvolini affair, disputes over precedence and plagiarism punctuated the decipherment story. Thomas Young's work is acknowledged in Champollion's 1822 ''Lettre à M. Dacier'', but incompletely, according to early British critics: for example, [[James Browne (writer)|James Browne]], a sub-editor on the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (which had published Young's 1819 article), anonymously contributed a series of review articles to the ''[[Edinburgh Review]]'' in 1823, praising Young's work highly and alleging that the "unscrupulous" Champollion plagiarised it.<ref>[[#Parkinson99|Parkinson et al. (1999)]]{{Broken anchor|date=2024-06-30|bot=User:Cewbot/log/20201008/configuration|target_link=#Parkinson99|reason= }} pp.&nbsp;35–38</ref><ref>[[#Robinson09|Robinson (2009)]] pp.&nbsp;65–68</ref> These articles were translated into French by [[Julius Klaproth]] and published in book form in 1827.{{Cref2|N}} Young's own 1823 publication reasserted the contribution that he had made.{{Cref2|L}} The early deaths of Young (1829) and Champollion (1832) did not put an end to these disputes. In his work on the stone in 1904 [[E. A. Wallis Budge]] gave special emphasis to Young's contribution compared with Champollion's.<ref>[[#Budge70|Budge (1904)]] vol. 1 pp.&nbsp;59–134</ref> In the early 1970s, French visitors complained that the portrait of Champollion was smaller than one of Young on an adjacent information panel; English visitors complained that the opposite was true. The portraits were in fact the same size.<ref name="focus47"/>