THE RACE TO DECIPHER ANCIENT EGYPT, SACRED SCRIPT

The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 breathed life into a quest long deemed impossible: the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Toby Wilkinson tells the tale of the two rivals who raced to be first to crack the code

- Toby Wilkinson

For more than 40 generations, no living soul was able to read an ancient Egyptian text. Even before the last-known hieroglyphic inscription was carved (in August AD 394), detailed understanding of the script had all but died out in the Nile Valley, save for a few members of the elite. As those with the specialist knowledge also dwindled, speculation took over and fanciful theories sprang up about the meaning of the mysterious signs seen adorning Egyptian monuments.

As early as the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus had averred that the script was “not built up from syllables to express the underlying meaning, but from the appearance of the things drawn and by their metaphorical meaning learned by heart”. In other words, it was believed hieroglyphics did not form an alphabet, nor were they phonetic (signs representing sounds). Instead, they were logograms, pictures with symbolic meaning.

This was a fundamental misconception, and deflected scholars from decipherment for the following 19 centuries. The European Enlightenment’s ablest philologists (those who study the history and development of languages) deemed the task to be impossible. English antiquarian William Stukeley said in the early 18th century: “The characters cut on the Egyptian monuments are purely symbolical… The perfect knowledge of ’em is irrecoverable.” Five decades later, French orientalist Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy dismissed the work of deciphering the writing as “too complicated, scientifically insoluble”.