HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING

Right from the beginning the deciphering of the mys­terious Egyptianwriting fascinated everybody. In 1799 a certain Captain Bouchard of the FrenchArmy was supervising work on the fortifications of Fort St. Julian, situated alittle more than four kilometers out­side the town of Rosetta when hisworkmen discovered a stone which was destined to achieve great fame inarcheological history. It was in fact the «Rosetta Stone» which led to thedeciphering of the hiero­glyphs.

Asa result of the fortunes of war this precious stone fell into the hands of theBritish who gave it a place of honor in the British Museum. On one face of thestone, a tablet of extremely hard black basalt, there is a long trilingualinscription, the three texts being writ­ten one above the other. The firstof the inscriptions, 14 lines long, is written in hieroglyphs. The second, 32lines long, is written in demotic, from the Greek word «demos» meaning people,which refer to a type of script used by ordinary people. (Demotic is contrastedwith hieratic, from «hieros» meaning sacred, whose use was restricted topriests and scholars). The third in­scription, 54 lines long, is in Greekand hence was comprehensible. This latter text, translated without difficulty,proved to be a priestly decree in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes which finishes witha formal in­struction that « this decree, engraved on a tablet of hardstone, in three scripts, hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, shall be engraved ineach of the great temples of Egypt ».

The honor of deciphering the hieroglyphs fell to two scholars, theEnglishman Thomas Young and the Frenchman Francois Champollion who started workon it at almost the same time and who was to see their efforts crowned withsuccess. However Champollion probably has a greater right than his rival to beregard­ed as the man who deciphered the hieroglyphs. What Young achieved byinstinct Champollion achieved by scientific method and with such success that byhis death in 1832 he could leave behind him a grammar and a very substantialdictionary of ancient Egyptian. But what did this writing that the Greeks calledhiero­glyphic, from « hiero glyphica », that is « sacred signs », actuallyconsist of? The ancient Egyptians themselves called their written texts « thewords of the gods ». In fact according to tradition men were taught to write bythe god Thot himself during the reign of Osiris. Down through the centuries thewriting re­tained a sacred character and more or less magical powers.Anybody who knew how to write the approxi mately seven hundred signs which constituted Egypti­an writing, eachsign representing a sound or an ob­ject, was held in great esteem. The namesof the kings and queens were surrounded by an outline which archeologists call a« cartouches ». It was precisely from the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy,engraved inside their « cartouches » on the Rosetta Stone, that Champollionstarted his long work on the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. The ancientEgyptians either engraved the hieroglyphs in the stonework of their temples orpaint­ed them on the walls of the burial chambers or in­scribed themwith a reed pen on rolls of papyrus, the antecedent of ourpaper.