For roughly fourteen hundred years, the hieroglyphic script was a closed system. The last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved at the temple of Philae in 394 CE. After that, the tradition simply stopped. The people who knew how to read it died, their students died, and the knowledge was lost. The intricate writing carved on every temple wall in Egypt became beautiful, inscrutable decoration.

By the 18th century, European scholars were making guesses. Some thought hieroglyphs were a mystical symbolic language in which each sign represented an abstract idea rather than a sound. Others thought the animal signs were literal — that a picture of a hawk always meant hawk. Both theories were wrong, and both made the problem harder to solve. The actual breakthrough required starting from scratch with a specific piece of physical evidence: a slab of dark granodiorite found by a French soldier in a town called Rosetta in 1799.

The Stone

The Rosetta Stone is not impressive to look at. It is 112 centimeters tall and 76 centimeters wide, broken at the top, slightly irregular, and covered in densely packed text. It was not a royal monument or a religious inscription. It was an administrative decree, issued in 196 BCE by the priests of Memphis in honor of the thirteen-year-old pharaoh Ptolemy V, confirming his divine status and listing the tax exemptions and benefactions he had granted to the temples.

What makes it extraordinary is that the same decree was written three times in three different scripts: at the top, in hieroglyphs; in the middle, in Demotic (the everyday Egyptian script of the period); and at the bottom, in Greek. The stone itself says why: it was to be set up in every major temple so that everyone could read it. In 196 BCE, different communities in Egypt used different scripts, and the priests wanted the message accessible to all of them.

The Greek section was read immediately when the stone was discovered, because Greek was a known language. It confirmed that the other two sections contained the same text. This was the key the decipherers needed: a bilingual (actually trilingual) text where the meaning of one version was known.

Napoleon’s Army and British Hands

Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in Egypt in 1798 with an army and, unusually for a military expedition, a corps of 160 scholars, scientists, and artists charged with documenting everything they found. The French occupation of Egypt was the beginning of modern Egyptology. The Rosetta Stone was found in July 1799 by French soldiers digging fortifications near the town of Rosetta (modern Rashid) in the Delta. Its significance was recognized immediately, and casts were sent to scholars in Paris.

When the French surrendered to the British in 1801, the terms of the Capitulation of Alexandria transferred Egyptian antiquities, including the Rosetta Stone, to British hands. The stone arrived in Britain in 1802 and was deposited in the British Museum, where it has been ever since, apart from a brief period during World War I when it was moved to an underground station for safekeeping.

The Decipherment

The decipherment of hieroglyphs was a competition, mostly between an Englishman and a Frenchman, lasting over twenty years.

Thomas Young was a British polymath — he also made fundamental contributions to the theory of light, vision, and what is now called Young’s modulus in materials science. He came to the Rosetta Stone in 1814. By 1819 he had made several crucial observations: that the oval cartouches in the hieroglyphic text contained royal names; that the hieroglyphic system used at least some phonetic signs, not just symbolic ones; and that he could identify the name Ptolemy within the cartouche by matching its signs to known Greek sounds.

Young’s progress was real but incomplete. He correctly identified about a dozen hieroglyphic signs with phonetic values. Then he largely stopped, partly because he became convinced that phonetic signs were only used for foreign names and that most Egyptian words were still written symbolically. This was wrong, and it prevented him from going further.

Jean-François Champollion was a French linguist who had been fascinated by Egypt since childhood and had taught himself Coptic — the last descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, still used in the Coptic Christian church — specifically because he believed it would be the key to understanding the old scripts. He was right. Coptic preserved the vowel sounds that hieroglyphs, like modern Arabic, did not write, giving Champollion a window into how the ancient language actually sounded.

In September 1822, Champollion was working on inscriptions that included not just Ptolemaic cartouches but much older ones from monuments predating Greek rule. He was able to read a cartouche containing the signs for R, a sun disk (which he knew from Coptic was Ra), ms, and ss. The name was Ramesses. He ran to his brother’s office nearby, shouted “Je tiens l’affaire!” (I have it!), and fainted. He had proved that the phonetic system was not limited to foreign names but was the core structure of the entire script.

On September 27, 1822, Champollion presented his Lettre à M. Dacier to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in Paris, announcing the decipherment. It is one of the great moments in the history of scholarship. Fourteen centuries of silence ended in a fainting spell and a formal letter.

What the Script Actually Is

Hieroglyphs are not a picture language or a symbolic alphabet. They are a mixed system that linguists call a logosyllabic script. Signs can function in three different ways, sometimes simultaneously. A sign can be a logogram, representing a whole word (a picture of a sun can mean “sun”). It can be a phonogram, representing one or more consonant sounds regardless of what the picture depicts (that same sun sign, read as r, can be used to spell words that have nothing to do with the sun). And it can be a determinative, an unpronounced sign placed at the end of a word to clarify its category (a seated man determinative at the end of a word signals that it refers to a person).

Like Arabic and Hebrew, hieroglyphs were written without vowels. Only consonants were indicated. This means we do not know exactly how ancient Egyptian sounded. Scholars use Coptic, loanwords in other ancient languages, and comparative linguistics to make educated guesses about the vowels, but the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian will probably never be fully recovered.

The decipherment of hieroglyphs opened three thousand years of Egyptian writing to scholarship. What had been mute stone suddenly spoke. The texts on temple walls, the spells in the Book of the Dead, the administrative papyri, the royal decrees, the love poetry, the medical texts — all of it became readable within a generation of Champollion’s announcement. Egyptology as a modern discipline begins in that fainting spell in Paris in 1822.