Editing Egyptian hieroglyphs (section)

==Decipherment==
{{Main|Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts}}
[[File:Ibn Wahshiyya's 985 CE translation of the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph alphabet.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|Ibn Wahshiyya's attempt at a translation of a hieroglyphic text]]
Knowledge of the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period. 
Early attempts at decipherment were made by some such as [[Dhul-Nun al-Misri]] and [[Ibn Wahshiyya]] (9th and 10th century, respectively).<ref>{{cite book |author=Ahmed ibn 'Ali ibn al Mukhtar ibn 'Abd al Karim (called Ibn Wahshiyah) |title=Ancient alphabets & hieroglyphic characters explained: with an account of the Egyptian priests, their classes, initiation time, & sacrifices by the aztecs and their birds, in the Arabic language |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MKvYqEEboTYC |access-date=31 October 2011 |year=1806 |publisher=W. Bulmer & Co.}}</ref>

All medieval and early modern attempts were hampered by the fundamental assumption that hieroglyphs 
recorded ideas and not the sounds of the language. As no bilingual texts were available, any such symbolic 'translation' could be proposed without the possibility of verification.<ref>{{Cite journal |url=http://atena.beic.it/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=13384397&search_terms=DTL60 |title=Tabula Aegyptiaca hieroglyphics exornata |journal=Acta Eruditorum |date=March 1714 |location=Leipzig |pages=127–128 |language=la}}</ref> It was not until [[Athanasius Kircher]] in the mid 17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds. Kircher was familiar with Coptic, and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs, but was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols.<ref name="Last hieroglyph" />

[[File:rosetta stone.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|The [[Rosetta Stone]] in the [[British Museum]]]]
The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the [[Rosetta Stone]] by [[Napoleon]]'s troops in 1799 (during [[French Campaign in Egypt and Syria|Napoleon's Egyptian invasion]]). 
As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a demotic version of the same text in parallel with a Greek translation, plenty of material for falsifiable studies in translation was suddenly available. In the early 19th century, scholars such as [[Silvestre de Sacy]], [[Johan David Åkerblad]], and [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]] studied the inscriptions on the stone, and were able to make some headway. Finally, [[Jean-François Champollion]] made the complete decipherment by the 1820s. In his ''{{lang|fr|[[Lettre à M. Dacier]]}}'' (1822), he wrote:

<blockquote>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.<ref>[[Jean-François Champollion]], Letter to [[Bon-Joseph Dacier|M. Dacier]], September 27, 1822</ref></blockquote>
[[File:Acta Eruditorum - I geroglifici, 1714 – BEIC 13384397.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|Illustration from ''{{lang|la|Tabula Aegyptiaca hieroglyphicis exornata}}}'' published in {{langr|la|[[Acta Eruditorum]]}}, 1714]]