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Who Discovered Ancient Egyptian Writing

When was ancient Egyptian writing discovered? And who unlocked the secret? Let’s take a look together below. In 1799, when Napoleon led an army expedition to Egypt, one of his officers, Bouchard, led soldiers to build fortifications near the city of Rosetta, and found a broken black basalt monument.

The same inscription is engraved on the stele in two languages ​​and three fonts. The hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt are used on the top, the cursive hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt (also known as civil script) are used in the middle, and the Greek characters are below. This is the famous stele later called the “Rosetta Stele” by the world.

If you want to truly understand the culture and history of ancient Egypt, you must understand Egyptian hieroglyphics. Therefore, after the news of the discovery of the “Rosetta Stele” was published in the “Egyptian Newspaper” at that time, it immediately attracted the attention of scholars from all over the world. They tried to decipher the words on the stele. The Greek on the stele was quickly read. The text in the middle of the stele was quickly confirmed to be the ancient Egyptian folk script.

However, although scholars can understand the meaning of hieroglyphs and folk scripts with the help of the Greek on the stele, they still have not solved the mystery of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It is amazing that the 11-year-old French teenager Champollion Determined to uncover the secrets of ancient Egyptian writing on the “Rosetta Stele”, let the stele speak and tell people the secrets of ancient Egypt. In order to read Egyptian hieroglyphs, he worked diligently for 21 years. Champollion discovered that when the ancient Egyptians wrote the king’s name, they would add a box or draw a thick line under the name.

The “Rosetta Stele” also has text framed with lines. Is it the king’s name? After continuous exploration, Champollion finally read the two hieroglyphs, King Ptolemy and Queen Cleopatra, in contrast to the Greek text. They can be written from right to left, left to right, or from Spell it out top to bottom. Champollion was thus convinced that the pictographic symbols in hieroglyphs, in general, represented the consonant symbols of sound. After hard work, in 1822, the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had been puzzling for more than 1,000 years, was finally solved by Champollion.

It turns out that the inscription on the “Rosetta Stele” is a letter of gratitude written by the monks of Memphis, Egypt, to the king at that time in 196 BC. This king was the Fifteenth Dynasty Pharaoh Ptolemy. Soon after he ascended the throne of the king, he canceled the taxes owed by the monks, opened up new sources of income for the temple, took special protection measures for the temple, and brought a series of benefits to the monks, so it is very Almost won the admiration of the monks.

So the monks wrote this letter of gratitude and engraved it on the black basalt stele in two characters written in three fonts. The small city of Rosetta is famous all over the world because of this stele used to solve the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, the famous stele is no longer in the city; it is housed in the British Museum in London.

Writing system

There are 25 monophonic characters in Egyptian hieroglyphics : but only 24 sounds, mainly s corresponds to two symbols, and generally the two symbols correspond to s and z respectively, but the pronunciation of the two is similar, so it is classified as one sound here ), 137 disyllabic characters (in fact, the number of real disyllabic characters is slightly more than 137, but, considering the difference between them is very small, it is classified as a class of symbols, here only the three js sounds The symbols are disassembled and counted separately. Secondly, these 137 symbols only correspond to 101 double-syllables, that is to say, one double-syllable can correspond to several double-syllable characters.

72 three-syllable characters : The 72 three-syllable characters here are counted according to the number of three-syllable characters. Among the three-syllable characters, the pictographic symbols corresponding to the same sound are basically similar, and there are also graphic characters that can directly express meaning and sound at the same time, like this There are not many real pictographs, and most of them use the pronunciation of several pictographs to represent other concepts. It is similar to the usage of borrowing sounds in Chinese. The qualifier is similar to the role of radicals in Chinese.

In the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the ideographic, ideographic and phonetic symbols are combined, and the signifiers and phonetic symbols are all derived from the pictographic graphics. The difference from Chinese is that they still maintain separate graphic characters. Interestingly, this kind of characters can be written horizontally or vertically, and can be written to the right or to the left. The direction depends on the direction of the head of the animal character; as for how well-proportioned and beautiful the word unit is Write, as long as it does not affect the meaning, you can freely go up, down, left, and right. This can be said to be one of the calligraphic features of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

When we talk about Egyptian hieroglyphics, it generally refers to the hieroglyphic script, which is mainly used in more solemn occasions, and is more common in the carving of inscriptions on temples, monuments and pyramids. The monk style is mostly used for writing on papyrus, which is equivalent to running script or cursive script of Chinese characters. The secular form is a simplification of the monk form.