Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts/archive1

Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts

 * Nominator(s): A. Parrot (talk) 09:14, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

The decipherment of these scripts, of which hieroglyphs are the most famous, was a much longer process than it is often thought of as being. I've made an effort to give credit to everybody who contributed to the process of decipherment, and to give an impartial account of the controversy between the two who contributed the most, Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. I've also tried to write in British English, given that all the English-speaking figures in the story were British, but some Americanisms may have crept in. This article complements our FA on the Rosetta Stone and GA on Champollion, and it has been informally looked over by User:Andrew Dalby, who contributed to the former, and User:Iry-Hor, who has helped maintain and improve the latter.

The tables of glyphs use WikiHiero, but unfortunately WikiHiero characters don't display in the mobile version of Wikipedia. I've filed a bug report but do not know if it will be resolved. There are alternatives to WikiHiero (images and Unicode characters), but they aren't as flexible or easy to integrate into a table as WikiHiero. I hope this problem will not be an obstacle to the article's passage. A. Parrot (talk) 09:14, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Review Support by Iry-Hor
I would be glad to review this stellar contribution to Wikipedia. I will write my comments shortly.Iry-Hor (talk) 09:31, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

I will write all the things I see, but some might be nitpicking, so feel free to ignore them:
 * Lede: " in the fourth and fifth centuries AD", should it be "fourth or fifth" or is it really fourth and fifth ? We the "and" I understand this as a gradual loss. Leave it like that if this is so.
 * It was a gradual loss, and the last hieroglyphic text was written in the fourth century and the last in demotic in the fifth. See also my response to the point about decline in the body text.


 * Lede: "Despite some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars..." given the nice way of explaining the history of decipherment in the lede, it seems to me that it would be better to specify the periods meant here, e.g. as in "Despite some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars during the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods..."
 * I've specified the time period, although I think with the added words it was best to rearrange the sentence a bit.


 * Lede: "perception of hieroglyphs as ideographic hampered efforts to understand them up through the 18th century." I seem to remember that some people continued to hold such ideas in the early 19th century as well, i.e. concurrently with Young and Champollion's earliest efforts. If so, you might want to end with "[...] understand them up through the 18th and early 19th centuries".
 * Hard to say. The ideographic orthodoxy held sway up until Warburton, but after his time there seems to have been some willingness to acknowledge phonetic signs might exist even in the hieroglyphic script (e.g., in Zoëga's work), even if many people were attached to hieroglyphic mysticism. I was thinking particularly of Young, whose failure to acknowledge phoneticism outside the cartouches is often wrongly attributed to the old orthodoxy. As Iversen says and the article mentions, he looked for phonetic signs but was stymied by the wild variety of spellings, not by the assumption that such signs did not exist.


 * Lede: "many of the phonetic signs in demotic. He also identified the meaning of many hieroglyphs" could we replace of the two "many" to avoid repetition?
 * Done.


 * Lede: "grammar and vocabulary of Egyptian" perhaps replace with "grammar and vocabulary of Ancient Egyptian" ?
 * I generally refer to the language as just "Egyptian", as that is its name, but in this case I suppose the distinction is necessary. Done.

Now on the first section:
 * "sometime before 3000 BC." Could you perhaps give a reference here ? I think that the latest research, notably from the discoveries of tomb U-j, has pushed this back to c. 3100 BC. I will see if I can find Dreyer's opinion on this.
 * Allen 2014, the citation for this sentence, actually says c. 3200, but between the uncertain dating for the Protodynastic and the problem of what actually counts as a writing system, I thought it safer to be vague. I'll specify c. 3200 if you want.
 * Thanks, I think c. 3200 is best indeed.Iry-Hor (talk) 11:02, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Done.


 * Beautiful paragraph from "Many Greek and Roman[...]" until "[...]same consonants" !
 * "Both hieroglyphic and demotic died out during the third through fifth centuries AD" seems to contradict the lede that says "fourth and fifth".
 * I've tried to clarify this. The decline, which coincided with the sharp decline of the temple priesthoods, began in the third century. Loprieno, p. 26: "the third century CE represents the turning point: hieroglyphic texts exhibit a progressive decay both in their grammatical structure and in the formal appearance of the signs". Egypt in Late Antiquity by Roger Bagnall, which is in Loprieno's footnotes for this passage, says that only at the temples of Hermonthis and Philae did knowledge of hieroglyphs even survive into the fourth century. However, the scripts didn't completely cease to be understood, as the lead section puts it, until they died out at Philae. I hope this no longer looks like a contradiction.


 * "[...]Egyptian example of such a source was the history of Egypt written by Manetho in[...]" this sentence would be better with the explicit name of this work Aegyptiaca. You can wikilink it to the appropriate section on Manetho's article.
 * Done.

Second section:
 * "Europeans were ignorant of Coptic as well. European scholars" I think that by the context it is clear that the second sentence pertains to European scholars and so I would advocate for remving the second "Europeans" to avoid repetition. It is debatable however so this is as you see fit.
 * Done.


 * "Coptic monks, and no Europeans of the time had the opportunity to learn from one of these monks" It might be worth stating why this is so. I presume it is because Coptic monks were in Egypt (as today), however this may not be clear to all readers.
 * Correct; Hamilton says that the way Europeans in this period tended to learn non-European languages (in the 15th century, even Greek!) was for a native speaker to visit Europe and be recorded, and no one who knew Coptic seems to have gone to Europe in that time. I've clarified.


 * "European contact with Egypt increased during the 18th century. More Europeans visited the country and saw its ancient inscriptions firsthand,[38] and as Europeans collected antiquities, the number of texts available for study increased.[39] Jean-Pierre Rigord became the first European[...]" too many "European(s)" here for my taste. Could we perhaps remove the middle ones ?
 * Done.

I have reached the "Reading texts" section with no further comments for the moment. I will wrap up soon.Iry-Hor (talk) 16:25, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

I have reached the end, it is an excellent article. One would like to read about the next stages of research on the matter, perhaps a paragraph on modern research pertaining to understanding the Egyptian language although I guess this is beyond the scope of this article. In any case, the feeling that one would like to read more testifies to the quality of the present article. Good Job!Iry-Hor (talk) 16:52, 13 October 2019 (UTC)


 * This is comforting to read. I worried I was going a bit too far beyond the scope in the last paragraph, but it really did strike me that 1866 and 1867 seem to have been the years when the basics were absolutely nailed down. Linguistic developments beyond that (the Berlin School and beyond) really would be a separate article, and much of it beyond my comprehension. Thank you for your comments. A. Parrot (talk) 18:14, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Support by Andrew Dalby
Forgive me, I don't have time right now to do a proper review, but I've watched the article develop and I consider it a great piece of work. It merits featured status. Andrew Dalby 18:38, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

Support by Kaiser matias
A fascinating topic that I've always found interesting. Reading through the article I see no issues, and it comes across quite clearly for something quite complex. Kaiser matias (talk) 16:43, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

Sources review

 * No spotchecks carried out
 * Formats
 * Ref 130 requires p. not pp. (that's the only issue)

Brianboulton (talk) 23:18, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Quality/reliability: no issues. Coverage is appropriately comprehensive and scholarly.

Comments by MONGO
In an article this refined and of such overall excellence, its not easy to spot issues, but a few quibbles:
 * Standardize the time periods: In third paragraph in the section titled Egyptian scripts and their extinction, we have the dates written as "1st century BC", "1st century AD" then "third century AD" followed by "4th century AD". I did not readily see if this should be written in a numerical or written format but it should be one or the other, not both.
 * I think my natural inclination is to use words for single-digit centuries and millennia but numbers for double digits. If I remember correctly, somebody treated this pattern as an inconsistency on a previous article I worked on, so when writing this one I was trying but not succeeding to make myself use numbers all the time. There's also the problem of millennia, for which numbers feel especially weird to me. MOS:CENTURY itself uses "1st century" and "second millennium" in the same sentence. What do you recommend? A. Parrot (talk) 18:34, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
 * MOS is not fully clear. Where did I see that numbers one (first) through ten (tenth) are written but above that are numerical. My thinking is it looks fine either way but just needs to be standardized. It's a minor detail really.--MONGO (talk) 06:09, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I changed it all to words. A. Parrot (talk) 16:38, 17 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Same section but comparing first and third paragraphs we have "seventh century BC" and later "fourth century BC". to contrast with "4th century AD" in third paragraph. Lets standardize this if we can.
 * Dates written as 3200 BC need a non-breaking space between number and "BC".
 * Done. A. Parrot (talk) 18:34, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

--MONGO (talk) 07:54, 16 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Tagging to see if he's interested reviewing this. HaEr48 (talk) 03:28, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Support by Masjawad99
I have read through the article several times, and I don't find any major issues in it. The only suggestion I could give is to change the spellings of "favors", "fervor", and "traveled" to "favours", "fervour", and "travelled" if you want to stick with BrE. Otherwise, the article is in magnificent shape. Kudos to for such a well-written piece. If I have time, I might actually translate this to Indonesian and bring it to FA status in id.wiki as well. You might want to ping somebody to do an image review, though, since it still lacks one.  Masjawad99  💬 01:47, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Image review
I am only reviewing proper images, not the WikiHiero glyphs as I don't have the expertise to judge these:
 * File:RosettaStoneAsPartOfOriginalStele.svg: What is the Commons image discussed in the file description?
 * I'm pretty sure it's this one. I can't track down exactly where that one originated, but based on the edit summary from the file's creation it seems to have been something on Project Gutenberg. I've added a link to File:Rosetta_Stone_BW.jpeg in the description for File:RosettaStoneAsPartOfOriginalStele.svg; do I need to do anything else? A. Parrot (talk) 02:26, 20 November 2019 (UTC)


 * File:Grammaire Egyptienne by Jean Francois Champollion, 1836 - National Cryptologic Museum - DSC07733.JPG: Need a license for the book.
 * I added what I think should be the right license. A. Parrot (talk) 02:26, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Altered it a bit, you may want to add some information (author, publication date) for the book though. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:01, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Done. A. Parrot (talk) 01:42, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

All images are in good sections, with respect to ALT text some of that needs to be rewritten - the scope of ALT text is to substitute for the image, not simply to describe it, and I am not sure that File:C+B-Egypt-Fig2-LetterDevelopment.PNG has the best ALT text possible there. In general, the images of older works need to be appropriately tagged as commons:Template:PD-Art and commons:Template:PD-scan. Also, not really relevant to anything but the fact that we are dutifully copyright tagging an over one millennium old image like File:Ibn Wahshiyya's 985 CE translation of the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph alphabet.jpg amused me a little. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:00, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I've gone through and added the PD-Art and PD-Scan tags. I've changed the alt text for the file you pointed out, but I've always had difficulty figuring out what to do with alt text, so I don't know what else needs fixing. As for the Ibn Wahshiyya image, I'm accustomed to copyright-tagging art that's several thousand years old, so it's nothing new to me. A. Parrot (talk) 02:26, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Support from John M Wolfson
This looks great, good job! I took the liberty of merging a short paragraph into the preceding paragraph, but other than that this looks good. I'm not the biggest fan of "Further Reading" sections in FAs, as I believe that an FA should generally be all the reading a non-specialist needs on a subject, but I believe that the subject at hand is sufficiently specialized, and the given readings too primary for actual incorporation into the article, that the Further Reading section here is actually an improvement. This certainly isn't fatal and a bit nitpicky, but for future work I'd recommend you use sfn rather than ref tags for harvnb. – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 23:41, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Ian Rose (talk) 13:29, 30 November 2019 (UTC)