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Put another way, scholars already knew the ancient Egyptian language from Coptic, but did not know what the hieroglyphic signs meant.Īnother decipherment problem is where "the script is known, but not the language," Allen said. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing falls into the category of a case in which "the language is known, but not the script," said Allen. "There are basically three kinds of decipherment problems," Allen told Live Science. While Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered in the 19th century, there are still a number of ancient languages that are not understood today. "Egyptian hieroglyphs could simply not have been deciphered without Coptic," Stauder said.
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Arab scholars had already recognized the connection between the ancient and later forms of Egyptian language ," Maitland said. "Champollion studied Coptic with him and Yuhanna Chiftichi, an Egyptian priest based in Paris. Maitland pointed out that it was the Egyptian scholar Rufa'il Zakhûr who suggested to Champollion that he learn Coptic. "Champollion's knowledge of Egyptian Coptic meant that he was able to see the connection between the ancient symbols he was studying and the sounds that he was already familiar with from Coptic words," said Margaret Maitland, principal curator of the Ancient Mediterranean at National Museums Scotland. Since Champollion "knew Coptic - the last stage of ancient Egyptian, written in Greek letters - he could figure out the sound value of hieroglyphs from the correspondence between the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Greek translation on the Rosetta Stone," Allen said. (Image credit: Fotosearch via Getty Images) The Rosetta stone was key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Up until the scholar Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) started studying hieroglyphs, "scholars basically believed that all hieroglyphs were only symbolic" Allen told Live Science in an email, noting that Champollion's most important "contribution was to recognize that they could also represent sounds." Hieroglyphic writing contains signs that represent sounds and other signs that represent ideas (like how nowadays people use a heart sign to represent love) said James Allen, an Egyptology professor at Brown University. But notice this: although copies of the Rosetta inscription were circulated among scholars ever since its discovery, it would take more than two decades before any significant progress in decipherment was made" Andréas Stauder, an Egyptology professor at École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, told Live Science in an email. "The Rosetta inscription has become the icon of decipherment, in general, with the implication that having bilinguals is the single most important key to decipherment.