Egypt · The hinge
The Rosetta Stone
A broken slab of granodiorite, found in 1799 and deciphered by 1822, carrying one priestly decree of 196 BCE in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. Its parallel scripts helped make Egyptian writing readable again. From that point, European readers could place Egyptian-language texts beside the Greek and Renaissance accounts that had shaped esoteric Egypt for centuries.
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1799
A trilingual stone is found at Rosetta
Soldiers of Napoleon's expedition, rebuilding a fort at el-Rashid in the Nile delta, uncovered a broken granodiorite stela carrying one decree in three scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. The Greek could already be read.
The first object that made the hieroglyphs a soluble problem rather than an open question, because it placed a readable text beside an unreadable one and said they were the same text.
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1822
Champollion reads the hieroglyphs
Jean-François Champollion's Lettre à M. Dacier, read to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in September 1822, set out the phonetic values of the signs that spell foreign royal names, building on Thomas Young's demonstration that the cartouches were spelled out sound by sound.
Hieroglyphic became a script that could be read rather than a symbolism that had to be interpreted — which is the line between the third context of this section and the fourth, and the reason the two can be told apart at all.
Internet Archive — Champollion, Lettre à M. Dacier (1822), BnF scan
One decree, three scripts
The stone is not a dictionary. It carries the same decree three times: in hieroglyphic at the top, in demotic — a cursive Egyptian script — in the middle, and in Greek at the bottom. The Greek text could be read in 1799 and states near the end that the decree is to be inscribed in all three. Readers therefore knew that the Egyptian texts carried the same decree as the Greek.
| Register | Script | Language | In 1799 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top | Hieroglyphic | Egyptian | Unreadable, and widely held not to be writing |
| Middle | Demotic | Egyptian | Unreadable, and not yet understood to be the same language above it |
| Bottom | Greek alphabet | Greek | Readable by any educated European |
Having a translation is not having a decipherment. A reader with the Greek knows what the Egyptian means and still does not know which sign carries which sound, where one word ends, or whether the signs are sounds at all — and on the best authority available they were not. Greek writers had said for centuries that hieroglyphs were a symbolic script in which the priests recorded their philosophy, and every European attempt before the nineteenth century proceeded on that assumption, reading each sign as a concept. Working under it, no amount of Greek on the same stone helps, because the search is for meanings where the answer is spellings.
The way in was a foreign name
The decipherment began at the one place in an Egyptian text where the script is forced to behave alphabetically: a foreign name. Egyptian had no word for Ptolemy, so the name had to be spelled out, sound by sound, in the single-sound signs — and royal names are ringed in a cartouche, so they can be picked out of a wall of text without reading any of it. Thomas Young showed in 1814–1819 that the signs inside the cartouches were phonetic and read several of them correctly. Champollion took the same foothold and generalised it: the signs are phonetic in ordinary Egyptian words too, and the language they spell is the ancestor of Coptic, which he could already read. The Lettre à M. Dacier of 1822 is where that is set out.
A proposed reading of one name can be made to fit in several ways. Ptolemy and Cleopatra share p, t, o and l; finding the same signs in the corresponding positions provides a cross-check that the signs are phonetic. The two names are therefore commonly shown together.
p t o l e m y
c l e o p a t r a
THESE ARE THIS STUDY'S SPELLINGS, NOT THE STONE'S. They use the twenty-four single-sound signs and this study's table of English letters, which is a demonstration of the principle Young and Champollion worked from. The cartouches on the stone itself spell the two names with a partly different set of signs, including several that are not uniliteral, and this study has not transcribed them — a wrong sign in a facsimile is invisible to a reader, which is the answer the Holy Table's letters and the Great Table already get. Spell a name yourself.
What changed, and what continued
Decipherment opened three thousand years of Egyptian writing to sustained reading: the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, Book of the Dead, temple inscriptions, and medical and magical papyri. Those sources give Egyptian religion a voice in its own language alongside the Greek accounts through which Europe had long known it. Much of the Egyptian-language evidence used in this section depends on that change.
The symbolic and philosophical Egypt of Greek and Renaissance authors continued to nourish esoteric thought after decipherment. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, and the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, inherited that vocabulary and developed it for new religious and initiatory purposes. Egyptian-language sources and modern esoteric practice therefore form parallel, sometimes intersecting histories rather than a single account replacing another.