On 27 September 1822, the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion managed to decipher the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphics (the ancient Egyptian writing system composed of ideographic and alphabetic elements) thanks to the Rosetta Stone, a large stone slab discovered in 1799 which contained the same decree written in three different forms: Egyptian hieroglyphics, demotic writing (used for simpler and more popular) and ancient Greek. The text, known as the Decree of Memphis, dated back to 196 BC, during the reign of Ptolemy V (204-180 BC), and celebrated the sovereign.
Until then, despite the great interest in Egyptian culture, the decipherment of hieroglyphics remained a mystery. Both Arab and European scholars had tried to decipher them since the Middle Ages, but the attempts were fruitless, also because they did not understand that hieroglyphics represented a real form of writing. Most of those who worked on Egyptology between the Middle Ages and the modern age believed that they represented concepts rather than sounds or words.
However, thanks to the text of the stele, the situation was about to change. The presence of Greek, already known by scholars, in fact offered the possibility of comparing the content with the two Egyptian versions. Following the defeat of the French in the Egyptian campaign in 1801, the stolen archaeological and artistic assets were taken by the English, which is why the stele is still in the British Museum in London today. The French were only allowed to keep transcriptions of the text, which would be essential for the work of deciphering and translating. The main problem was understanding how hieroglyphics worked. At the beginning of the nineteenth century several hypotheses had already been put forward, but it was the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) who took the decisive step in 1822.
Champollion understood that hieroglyphics did not exclusively represent ideas or objects, as previous generations of scholars believed. Some signs could in fact have phonetic value, that is, indicate sounds. The comparison with the names of the sovereigns present in the cartouches, or the formulas with which the name of the pharaoh was reported, was fundamental: through the name of Ptolemy, Champollion managed to identify correspondences between the signs and sounds of the Egyptian language.
From here he developed the phonetic correspondences that paved the way for the deciphering of those hitherto enigmatic symbols. The Rosetta Stone was therefore not simply translated word for word. Its value lay in offering a known Greek text alongside two Egyptian versions, allowing the new interpretations to be progressively tested.
In 1822 Champollion presented his famous work to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris. Lettre à M. Dacierin which he illustrated the results of his research. The decipherment was not immediate nor completed in a single day, but that work represented the decisive turning point in the study of Egyptian writing. From that moment on, hieroglyphs ceased to be an indecipherable system of signs. Scholars could begin to directly read monumental inscriptions, religious texts, administrative documents and names of rulers, opening a new phase in the study of Egyptian civilization. The Rosetta Stone has therefore become the symbol of the decipherment of ancient Egypt: not because it alone contained the solution to the problem, but because it provided scholars with a concrete bridge between a known language and two still mysterious Egyptian writing systems.
