Talk:Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts

old talk
The writing in this article needs to be improved.--76.203.125.247 18:09, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

The actual decipherment of hieroglyphic writing needs to be finalized in the article. Who accomplished the feat, and when it finally happened are not clearly explained. Dr. Dan (talk) 05:14, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Not only is there essentially no discussion of Champollion and Young, the two people who actually actually deciphered the hieroglyphics, but the strange fixation on the Arab work, which while perhaps inspired, did nothing as far as I can tell to contribute to the final decipherment, seems odd and out of balance.Elakazal (talk) 05:44, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Why was Decipherment needed?
We need to add reasons as to why decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphics were so important. This can be achieved by adding information of archaeological finds which were not understood until the full decipherment in 1820. --LostOverThere (talk) 07:59, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Copyvio
Substantial portions of this article dating from 2006 are copied verbatim from http://www.andrewfanous.com/CopticCorner/CopticLanguage1.htm which carries a copyright date of 2003. 192.91.172.36 (talk) 01:43, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Merge into Egyptian hieroglyphics
I propose that this article be merged into either Egyptian hieroglyphs, or, if expanded to a more general overview of decipherment, Hieroglyph. There are several reasons for such a move - this article is thin on content and sourcing, and is largely overlapping information already in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the title is somewhat confusing since the article text deals exclusively with Egyptian hieroglyphs, but other historical hieroglyph systems exist and were deciphered at different times by different individuals, and finally, this article seems to place undue weight on the importance of incomplete Islamic attempts at decipherment. Dialectric (talk) 21:31, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree that the article is weak, but I suggest it's better to improve it. The decipherment was a complex historical story involving several individuals (so it doesn't fit neatly into the biography of any one of them) and too long and distracting to be a section of the Egyptian hieroglyphs article, which has to focus on the hieroglyphic system as it's now understood. I hope to improve this article while also working on Rosetta Stone.
 * I also agree the title isn't ideal. Since each script is different, each decipherment is different, so maybe this article should move to Decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. And rew D alby  12:52, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I support the idea of moving this article to Decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, as an alternative to a merge. Dialectric (talk) 13:27, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Suggest section on the reaction of the Catholic Church
Even if it's only a few sentences, I think it's a significant factor worth noting that the Catholic Church was threatened by Champolllion's expedition to Egypt due to the possibility that he might pre date some of the Hieroglyphs to the Great Flood( Noah's Ark). If this happened it would discredit biblical history as everything was supposed to be destroyed by the Great Flood and no civilization was capable of surviving it, (supposedly). Supposedly, the church asked Champillion to censor his findings if he found any records that predated the flood and one of the conditions of his expedition, an ultimatum given to him by the French government, was that he abide by this condition.
 * The problem is I cannot find any sources at the moment except this documentary from the BBC; Egypt:Secrets of the Hieroglyphs which I saw on youtube.

Actually, the church was a big fan of Napoleon, naming him a Defender of the Faith because of his decipherment of hieroglyphs believed to be present flanking the Dendera zodiac, which showed the zodiac to be Ptolemaic, not tens of thousands of years old as many were saying. (The translation proved to be based on an incorrect transcription, though the conclusion was correct). Although ultimately Champollion's discoveries clashed with church dogma, I don't think it wasn't until much later that the church became concerned about him.Elakazal (talk) 05:44, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Apparently Champollion did in fact keep some of his findings secret and it wasn't until his death that these facts were revealed. If someone can find a source for any of this, it would be helpful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Braineater30 (talk • contribs) 18:59, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Decipherment?
I did not realize Egyption hieroglyphs were a cypher. A cypher is a character or symbol substitution scheme intended to obfuscate the original message. Perhaps "translate" is a better choice. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brett h l (talk • contribs) 12:22, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * "Decipherment" is the usual word for finding the key to, or making sense of, a form of writing that was previously not understood. "Translation" is a different thing: it means turning words or sentences in one language into another language. In the case of ancient Egyptian, the script had to be deciphered before the texts could be translated: the two processes are not the same. Andrew Dalby 18:26, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I disagree. The key understanding of cypher is "obfuscate". Were the ancient Egyptian writings a cypher? In other words were they intended to encrypt? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brett h l (talk • contribs) 23:49, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The word "decipher" means "to find the meaning of (something that is difficult to read or understand)" and "decipherment" is absolutely correct here. See, for instance, Maurice Pope's book describing the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and other ancient writing systems, The Story of Decipherment.

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Decipherment & Horapollon
The problem with this article is, that "decipherment" normally means, that someone is able to find the phonetical values of characters or letters. That's why Horapollo's "Hieroglyphica" are considered wrong or at least misleading. He is not giving any phonetical values, but translations. Van de Walle and Vergote in their edition 1943 (French) have shown, that most translations are correct. You can easily prove this by comparing Horapollo's Greek explanations with modern Egyptian dictionaries. The misconception is, that the phonetical values are considered necessary for understanding or translating a Hieroglyphical text. They are not and Horapollo was right. Non-the-less Champollion had finally cracked the code completely, not by adding phonetical values, but by demonstrating, that the Hieroglyphs are a complex system, that has ideographic and phonetical uses and not by breaking away from the methods of his predecessors, but by completing them, especially by using Chinese characters as examples (with the help of Abel Remusat). This means, you can translate an Egyptian text completely without knowing the phonetical values. So a "decipherment" in the strict sense is not necessary.--36.97.187.211 (talk) 12:45, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Um, no, it really isn't possible to decipher a hieroglyphic text without knowing the phonetic values. Phonetic signs make up the bulk of any given hieroglyphic text. From Middle Egyptian by James P. Allen, page 29: "Contrary to popular belief (and the general opinion of scholars before hieroglyphs were deciphered), writing with ideograms was the exception in hieroglyphic, rather than the rule. Even words that we might imagine could have been written with an ideogram often used phonograms instead." The text goes on to say that determinatives, which give some indication of the meaning of the word, were often appended to words that were written phonetically, but they were omitted in prepositions and other very common words. Reading a whole hieroglyphic text is thus impossible without reading the phonetic signs and knowing the underlying language. A. Parrot (talk) 01:08, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
 * You don't need to read an Egyptian text aloud. We don't know the original pronunciation anyhow. The pronunciation James P. Allen, Alan Gardiner, Adolf Erman et al. are giving is artificial and not historically true. Just compare Horapollon with the Berlin Woerterbuch, Hannig's Woerterbuch et al. and you will see (as van de Walle and Vergote have seen before), that the meaning is in most cases correct. Champollion knew this very well and organized his own dictionary according to determinatives, like the Chinese dictionaries (Shuowen Jiezi and Kangxi according to 部首 bu shou. He only gave the Coptic writing to give a hint to the pronunciation. Richard Lepsius transformed most of Champollion's ideogrammes into "2-consonantal-' and "3-consonantal-signs", what was unnecessary and confusing.--36.97.187.211 (talk) 17:53, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
 * You're making so many wrong claims, I'm not sure where to start. I suppose I can start by saying what you're right about: Horapollo does contain some correct ideographic meanings, and it's impossible to fully reconstruct the pronunciation of the Egyptian language. But those points don't matter, because most of any given hieroglyphic text will be phonetic, and you have to be able to correlate the consonants that underlie each phonetic sign with each other, whether you can accurately pronounce them or not.


 * Lepsius did not label ideograms as biliteral and triliteral signs. (A lot of signs that function as biliterals and triliterals also function as ideograms, but that's not the same thing.) Champollion thought the signs that Lepsius labeled as biliterals and triliterals were simple uniliteral signs, with the result that Champollion believed there were far more ways to spell a single sound than there really were. Lepsius's modifications to Champollion's system are said to have rendered it genuinely workable for the first time and are integral to the modern understanding of hieroglyphs (see A History of Egyptology, Volume 1 by Jason Thompson, p. 199, and Cracking the Egyptian Code by Andrew Robinson, pp. 243–245). Therefore, I can only conclude that you're arguing against the scholarly consensus of the past 180 years or so, which Wikipedia is not the place for. In any case, Wikipedia talk pages are for discussing improvements to articles, not for discussion of the topic itself. Is there a specific change that you want to make to this article? A. Parrot (talk) 01:37, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

British English
Just noting that I've tried to use British English in this article, even though I'm American, because the only English-speaking figures mentioned in the article were British. A. Parrot (talk) 22:59, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Context of dates
"ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD". What was going on in Egypt at the time? Why was meaning lost. I've just been to Egypt to look, and they don't seem to have any dates, so it's not possible to work it out from there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.206.162.148 (talk) 09:23, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * It's normal if a script is superseded in everyday use. People are no longer taught to write it; eventually those remaining who can write it stop doing so or eventually die. People rarely learn to read it; those who still can eventually die. Those with an interest in history or old inscriptions may maintain the knowledge, but if any such tradition ceases, there's no one left to understand the script.
 * There is a paragraph on the subject at Rosetta Stone (with a footnote) mentioning the significant date of 391 when all non-Christian temples were closed and the monumental use of hieroglyphics ceased. Some of that information might fit in this article too. Andrew Dalby 12:38, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The body of the article describes how knowledge of the ancient scripts died out, including the extinction of the religion and its priesthoods. The passage that the OP quotes is from the lead section, though, and I see now that it could be read as meaning that writing itself died out in Egypt. I'll change the section to say that Coptic replaced the older scripts. A. Parrot (talk) 01:34, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Caylus illustration
Do you know more details about the origin of the illustration you added (File:Divine Legation Caylus.png)? I can't entirely tell what it is—a comparison of hieroglyphs with hieratic signs?—and although Pope 1999 says a little about Caylus, it treats him as a collector and copyist, not an analyst. Barthélemy worked from Caylus's collection, and I wonder if this table might not be his work and not that of Caylus. The image description has a link to Google Books, but it links to the bare image itself, not to the book it came from, so I can't tell if the book contains more information.

On an unrelated note, the "hide" button you added to the hieroglyphic table doesn't seem to work. If I knew more about coding tables, I might know how to fix that, but I don't. A. Parrot (talk) 20:05, 6 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Caylus did study hieroglyphs, and he demonstrated that the Egyptian Demotic script was derived from Hieroglyphs, following a general theory by Warburton that scripts generally evolved from drawings to hieroglyphs and then to alphabets. This is what the illustration shows, and this illustration is originally from Caylus's work (as written at the bottom of the image). Here's the book this is taken from: . And here is the original by Caylus: . पाटलिपुत्र  Pat   (talk) 20:15, 6 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I see that Warburton credits this illustration to Caylus's Recueil d'antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines, volume I (1752). Pope cites Barthélemy's work on hieroglyphs to this same book, suggesting that Barthélemy's analysis was published in Caylus's collection (as Barthélemy was working for Caylus):


 * "[Barthélemy] approved the outlines of Warburton's theory of Egyptian writing, and in helping to publish the Egyptian inscriptions of the Comte de Caylus (Caylus 1752, 69–70) he set out to test Warburton's theory of the interrelationship of the hieroglyphic and alphabetic systems. As we have seen, Warburton's theory predicted that some of the signs of the hieroglyphic would have been borrowed by the alphabetic script, and this prediction was apparently confirmed by Barthélemy's findings. (Pope 1999, p. 53)"


 * So it looks like Barthélemy was probably responsible for this part of the book, but the book was Caylus's and so the 1765 edition of Warburton credited him when citing it. I can't be sure without a secondary source that says so, and if we can't be sure who to attribute the image to, I'm reluctant to include it.


 * Whoever wrote the relevant part of Caylus's book, it seems unwise to say that this was when the connection between hieroglyphic and demotic was demonstrated. The biggest difficulty in writing this article is that different secondary sources will emphasize the contribution of the scholars they focus on, so it can be difficult to tease out who discovered what and when. Young tends to get the credit for making the connection between the two scripts; a letter by Young to de Sacy (here) represents it as his own realization, based on the Rosetta Stone. Young may have overlooked Barthélemy's work—the sources imply that his insight about the cartouches was long forgotten and the idea was credited solely to de Guignes—or perhaps it wasn't considered conclusive. Maybe the article can be tweaked to credit both Barthélemy and Young for making the connection, and to emphasize Young's key insight, that demotic inherited non-alphabetic characters from hieroglyphs rather than following the simple evolutionary scheme that Warburton had theorized. A. Parrot (talk) 22:09, 6 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the discussion! The part of the Caylus book about the relationship between Demotic and Hieroglyph is clearly by Caylus himself and claimed as his own (p65 first line: "The plates I hereafter describe represent pieces of cloth that have long been in my possession..." pages 65-76), as are the engravings (including XXVI) as mentionned page 72 Lines 3&4: "...Plate XXVI. I had an engraving made with a column of hieroglyphs ... and a column of Egyptians letters derived from the hieroglyphs". So I don't think there is reasonnable doubt about the authorship of the plate itself. These were not made by Barthélemy. It is true though that Caylus mentions in his introduction his indebtness to Barthélemy and some fellow members of the the Academy for unspecified parts of his work page xiv, lines 8-10. Barthélemy also presented one of the ideas in the Caylus article as his own in a 1761 publication p.725, and said in 1762 that he wrote the segment about Demotic looking similar to Phoenician p.78, and some authors have suggested the article was probably the result of his learned contribution p.31. Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy was 24 years younger than Caylus, and was 34 years old when the first Receuil was published by Caylus. In secondary sources, he is presented as a friend and collaborator of Caylus, "having the knowledge of several Oriental languages as well as numismatics, which Caylus lacked" (another collaborator of Caylus was abbé Augustin Belley), and Caylus appears as his mentor and promoter in Paris from the time Barthélemy arrived from Provence in 1744 at the age of 28, a young abbot without connections (234-235). It seems that Sainte-Croix exaggerated somewhat in his biography of Barthélémy the role the latter had in the redaction of the Receuil (p.1341). Sainte-Croix actually only lists four contributions by Barthélémy to the Receuils, for which Caylus indeed also credits Barthélémy directly, and especially only one contribution in the first Receuil on page 60 for the description of Greek inscriptions, and Sainte-Croix also mentions that "Barthélémy made various remarks to Caylus for this Receuil and helped him a lot for redaction" as explained here p.1341. Barthélémy became quite famous and authoritative in later years (correctly guessing in 1761 that the cartouche represented royal names, later reinforced by de Guignes), but it seems he was just one of the learned assistants under the wing of Caylus at the time the first Receuil was published in 1752 (p.1341). It is probably the case of an author (Caylus), relying heavily on the knowledge of his learned assistants, to publish an article on hieroglyphs in his own name. The assistant later became famous and surpassed his former "master" in achievements and in notoriety. This happens everyday, and does not make the assistant the official author of the work. Finally, I doubt that Young writing in 1815 would not have been aware of the work of Caylus (and possibly his assitant Barthélémy), which had also been described extensively and endorsed in English in the extremely famous work of Warburton as early as 1765 . पाटलिपुत्र  Pat   (talk) 08:02, 7 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I see. Part of the problem here is that demotic and hieratic weren't clearly distinguished from each other in the eighteenth century. My sources are vague on when the two were clearly distinguished (which is why the article text sidesteps the issue), but it seems to have been after the Rosetta Stone focused scholars' attention on demotic, and possibly long after. Therefore, it's not ideal to cite primary sources such as Caylus and Warburton, as the nature of Egyptian writing systems, and how their insights fit in with them, would not be fully understood until after those authors were dead. (This is one of the reasons why the Wikipedia policy on primary and secondary sources exists.) I think your text ("Elaborating on Warbuton's general theory, Anne Claude de Caylus was able to demonstrate that the Egyptian Demotic script was derived from Hieroglyphs") is actually describing the same insight as text that was already in the article ("Jean-Jacques Barthélémy tried to apply Warburton's ideas to Egyptian texts in European collections and noted that hieratic seemed to contain signs derived from hieroglyphs"). Caylus and Barthélemy—whichever one was responsible for this insight—saw the similarities between hieroglyphic and non-hieroglyphic Egyptian signs. I suggest this text, to go in the second paragraph of the section on the eighteenth century, where the text about Barthélemy currently is:


 * "Anne Claude de Caylus collected and published a large number of Egyptian inscriptions from 1752 to 1767, assisted by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy. Their work noted that non-hieroglyphic Egyptian scripts seemed to contain signs derived from hieroglyphs. Barthélemy also pointed out the oval rings, later to be known as cartouches, that enclosed small groups of signs in many hieroglyphic texts, and in 1761 he suggested that cartouches contained the names of kings or gods."


 * Would this text be compatible with what your sources say? A. Parrot (talk) 21:11, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Sounds good and balanced! Maybe we could explain a bit more what they saw: "They identified that non-hieroglyphic cursive Egyptian scripts seemed to consist in alphabetical letters graphically derived from hieroglyphs". I tried to improve the image and caption accordingly (using the French original). Thank you! पाटलिपुत्र  Pat   (talk) 05:09, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Comparative linguistics
I've just removed a paragraph from the lead section that was added in September. A lot of this text was simply redundant with what the article already said, but one sentence brought up a unique point: "It contributed to comparative linguistics, helping trace linguistic roots and relationships".

The most obvious linguistic insight made possible by the decipherment would seem to be the existence of the Afroasiatic language family, and I was thinking I might be able to find sources to support the claim. Lepsius was the first person to posit a forerunner to the modern understanding of the Afroasiatic languages (in the racially-biased form of the "Hamitic hypothesis"). However, I've looked for a bit and haven't come across sources that explicitly say Lepsius was only able to make the insight because of his work on Egyptian (this source doesn't quite say it). For all I know, it might have been theoretically possible to make the connection using only Coptic. Certainly one would suspect that the reason Afroasiatic is detectable, despite being the oldest known language family, is because its written records go back so far—Egyptian and Akkadian are literally the second and third languages to appear in writing. And I seem to recall someone, probably on the ref desk, saying that the Proto-Afroasiatic consonant-based structure was only preserved in Semitic and the pre-Coptic forms of Egyptian. But for now, the point is unsupported. A. Parrot (talk) 07:37, 6 December 2023 (UTC)