How the Rosetta Stone Decoded Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Paris, the fourteenth of September, eighteen twenty-two. A man bursts into his brother's office waving a fistful of notes and shouts, "Je tiens l'affaire, vois!"... Look, I've got it. And then he collapses on the floor.

Collapses? Like, fainted?

Fainted. According to the British Museum, that's the story. The man is Jean-François Champollion, he's thirty-one, and he has just cracked a code that had been unreadable for about fourteen hundred years.

Okay, but here's what I've never understood. Everybody says the Rosetta Stone is a "key". Same text in three scripts, one of them Greek. Why isn't that just... a translation exercise? Why does it take twenty-three years?

That is exactly the right question, and the answer is that everyone was wrong about what hieroglyphs even WERE.

Wrong how?

Scholars assumed they were purely ideographic. Symbols for ideas. The writer Edward Dolnick puts it beautifully: they thought hieroglyphs were so ornate, so mystical, that each one was the Egyptian equivalent of E equals m c squared. Not a way of writing "don't forget to pick up milk on your way home."

So they were looking for cosmic wisdom in what might be a receipt.

Essentially. And here's the thing about the stone itself. It's not some sacred artifact. It's a decree, issued the twenty-seventh of March, one ninety-six BC, in which priests at Memphis give King Ptolemy the Fifth divine honours in return for his good deeds. Admin. Royal PR. July seventeen ninety-nine. Napoleon has invaded Egypt with forty thousand troops. French soldiers are digging foundations for a fort at Rashid, in the Nile delta, sixty-five kilometres east of Alexandria. They pull a large broken stone out of the rubble.

And somebody immediately goes, oh, that's the one?

Immediately. Three scripts, visibly different, stacked on one slab. Hieroglyphs on top, demotic in the middle, Greek at the bottom. Fourteen lines, thirty-two lines, fifty-four lines. News spread fast.

Hang on, fourteen lines of hieroglyphs versus fifty-four of Greek? That's not much to work with.

It's broken. The top is missing. And then, after the French surrender in eighteen oh-one, the stone, all seven hundred and sixty-two kilos of it, is handed to the British.

Which I'm guessing the French never fully got over.

Not even slightly. But prints and casts went everywhere, so the race was open to anyone in Europe with patience. Enter Thomas Young. English. A physician and physicist, Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, and genuinely one of the great minds of the age. Wave theory of light. Young's modulus. Trichromatic colour vision. As a boy he learned Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, French, German and Italian.

Of course he did.

In eighteen fourteen he turns to Egyptian. And he has the first real breakthrough. He focuses on the cartouches, the little oval frames around certain sign groups. And he reasons: a foreign name like Ptolemy can't be written with picture-ideas. There's no symbol for "Ptolemy."

So how do you write a foreign name in a picture language?

Young looked at Chinese for the answer. To write a foreign name in Chinese you pick characters for their SOUND and ignore their meaning. So he guessed the Egyptians did the same inside those ovals. He pulled out signs he read as p, t, l, m, y, s. Published it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

So Young basically solved it? Why is the famous name Champollion?

Because Young then stopped. He decided phonetics were a special exception, only for foreign names. Everything else was still ideas. He got to the door and refused to walk through it. And Champollion had two things Young didn't. First, Coptic. The language of the Egyptian Christian church, descended from ancient Egyptian, written in Greek letters, so still readable. Champollion had been soaking in it for years.

So he could hear the language the signs were spelling.

Exactly. And second, he counts. One thousand four hundred and nineteen hieroglyphic signs on the stone... against four hundred and eighty-six Greek words.

That can't be ideas, then. Too many signs for too few words.

Three signs per idea? No. It has to be a hybrid. Sounds, and pictures, together. He takes Ptolemy and Cleopatra, cross-references the shared letters, and generates values for a, e, k, l, m, o, p, r, s, t.

From two names.

From two names. And then he finds something Young never saw. Looking at the signs for "Alexandria," he spots a group that spells the sound... plus an extra sign that just tells you what KIND of word it is. A place name. We call them determinatives.

Oh, that's clever. It's a label on the box.

Then comes the leap that actually breaks it open: the phonetic signs aren't only for foreigners. Egyptians wrote their OWN names that way too. The whole language was readable. Friday, the twenty-seventh of September, eighteen twenty-two. Champollion reads his Letter to Monsieur Dacier aloud at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris. That reading is considered the moment of decipherment.

And Young?

In the audience.

Oh, that's brutal. Sitting there listening to his own method go further than he took it.

The argument over who owed what to whom ran for decades, with heavy nationalist flavour on both sides. And honestly, it's still contested. Champollion's own letter does credit Young, and Åkerblad, and de Sacy, by name.

So the fair version is: Young opened the door, Champollion built the house.

That's close to it. Champollion's motto, in the end, was guess nothing, demonstrate everything. He spent the rest of his short life proving it, down to a grammar published four years after he died.

And without that one broken slab in a wall at Rashid?

Three thousand years of Egyptian writing stays beautiful and silent. Every tomb wall, every papyrus, pure decoration. We'd have pyramids and no voices.

All because some soldiers were building a fort in a hurry.

A dead language came back because a bureaucrat in one ninety-six BC decided the memo should be posted in three scripts... so that everybody could read it.