The Beginnings of Understanding Hieroglyphs Part 2
The lure of Egypt’s wealth was a temptation to foreign leaders and was the catalyst to the downfall of hieroglyphs. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great invaded Egypt and took it from the pharaohs of the Thirty-first Dynasty. It was at that point when Egypt’s great civilization began to fail. Handing Egypt to one of his trusted generals, Alexander placed Egypt under the rule of Soter Ptolemy I, the first of the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Greek and Roman tourists who had been fascinated with Egypt were flooding the land with a greater intensity than ever before. Egypt’s wealth became an interest to the Romans. The Romans saw Egypt as the breadbasket of their realm and were beginning to question why they should pay Egypt for the grains it produced. They started to consider taking over the country by force or otherwise. One final ruler stood up for Egypt’s independence. Cleopatra VII stood up to Julius Caesar, creating in him a powerful ally. Her cautious allegiance with Rome was shattered with Julius Caesar’s death. She tried once again to ally herself with a powerful Roman, Marc Antony, but that allegiance failed when Augustus Caesar defeated Cleopatra’s and Antony’s navy in one decisive battle. With that stroke of ill luck, Egypt fell to the Romans. Within a few hundred years, the civilization became a mere shadow of its former glory and the words scrawled on temple and tomb walls grew silent as their meanings were lost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Egypt).
It wasn’t until another invader came to Egypt nearly 1300 years after the hieroglyphs’ meanings were forgotten that the clues to unlock their secrets came together. Napoleon saw Egypt as another conquest, but he also saw it’s uniqueness and brought with his army a deluge of scientists to study and document the country. Napoleon’s interest in all aspects of Egypt resulted in the extremely thorough Le description de l’Egypte, The Description of Egypt. While the discoveries made by these scientists were great indeed, they paled in comparison to what a single foot soldier tripped over in Fort Julien near the port of Rashid. What at first appeared to be a single stone block of granite turned out to be an inscribed note dating to the Ptolemaic Period. The inscription held not only the hieroglyphs, but two other languages: Demotic and Greek. Realizing the importance of this block, dubbed the Rosetta Stone, “Rosetta” being a warped form of “Rashid,” Napoleon sent it to France for further study. It was here the stone was coated in black ink, and copied. These copies were then sent to some of the greatest scholarly minds such as Thomas Young, a British physicist and Johann Akerblad, a Swedish specialist in Middle Eastern Studies. Many people had hypotheses about the mysterious hieroglyphs, and one man began to expound upon these theories (Schumann-Antelme, Ruth and Stéphane Rossini: Illustrated Hieroglyphics Handbook).
François Champillion was a young, somewhat unconventional scholar who had sworn all his life that he would decipher the hieroglyphs. While studying the Rosetta Stone, Champillion built upon the theories of his peers and predecessors to break the code of the silent words. It had long been believed that the ancient Egyptian words within the loops were names and Champillion agreed. He focused his efforts on the names, otherwise known as cartouches. Working from the works of William Bankes who had discovered the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra on an obelisk from Philae, Champillion was able to find the Greek names Ptolemy and Cleopatra on his copy of the Rosetta Stone. He was also able to find the hieroglyphic correspondence to those names. He had discovered the sounds for p, t, o, l, i, m. That was not quite enough, as there were certain symbols within the hieroglyphs that had no corresponding sound within the Greek translation. As he knew Coptic, the language of the Egyptian Christians closely related to the language of the ancient Egyptians, Champillion quickly applied his knowledge of Coptic to some of the more frustrating hieroglyphic symbols. He found a parallel between the two languages and studied it further. He discovered the sound mose, a symbol added to the Greek alphabet used to make up the written Coptic texts. He knew the sun symbol was Ra and the ending sound was an S. Adding the three sounds together, Champillion discovered the name Rameses (Schumann-Antelme, Ruth and Stéphane Rossini: Illustrated Hieroglyphics Handbook).
It is with this knowledge modern Egyptologists are able to translate some of the most important scripts from ancient Egypt. Today, the temple walls no longer sadly echo their former glory, but, even to the passing scholar, they sing with meaning.
© 2009, Page Strong. All rights reserved.
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