Cracking the Code: Champollion and the Rosetta Stone

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

For over a thousand years after the last hieroglyphic inscription was carved, nobody could read Egypt's monuments. Renaissance scholars guessed that the signs were purely symbolic, mystical pictures rather than a working script, and that guess held the field back for centuries. The 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone, carrying the same royal decree in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, gave scholars a way in, but progress was slow: knowing what the text said in Greek did not by itself explain how the hieroglyphic signs worked. Jean-Francois Champollion spent years comparing royal names, which were conveniently ringed in an oval cartouche, across multiple bilingual inscriptions, and worked out that many hieroglyphic signs were genuinely phonetic, standing for sounds, not only for ideas. He announced the decipherment in 1822 and published his grammar of the system in the years that followed, finally showing that hieroglyphic writing was not primarily symbolic at all. Champollion later founded the Egyptian Antiquities department at the Louvre, and the trilingual stone that made his work possible remains one of the most visited objects in the British Museum today.