Champollion died in 1832, aged 41, ten years after his first results. His system was not accepted by everyone. Some scholars, such as Gustav Seyffarth, attacked it for the rest of their lives. Two things settled the argument: better grammar, and new bilingual texts.
Key idea
Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) corrected the system: in a published letter to Ippolito Rosellini (1837) he showed that many signs stand for two or three consonants, not one, and explained phonetic complements. The Canopus Decree, a decree of 238 BC in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek, found by Lepsius at Tanis in 1866, then let scholars check readings against a new, well-preserved text.
Why it works
A decipherment is proved when it predicts. If the readings are right, a newly found text in the old script should come out, when read by the rules, saying what its Greek version says. The Canopus Decree was found decades after the system was published, so no one could have tuned the rules to fit it. When its hieroglyphs, read by Champollion's and Lepsius's rules, matched its Greek, the decipherment was proved beyond reasonable doubt.
| Who | When | What |
|---|---|---|
| Champollion | 1822–1824 | sound signs in names; the mixed system |
| Lepsius | 1837 | signs for two or three consonants; phonetic complements; vowels not written |
| Lepsius | 1842–1845 | Prussian expedition; the plates of the Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien, still used today |
| Lepsius | 1866 | finds the Canopus Decree at Tanis: hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, mostly intact |
| Brugsch, Goodwin and others | 1850s–1860s | grammar and dictionaries of Demotic and hieratic |
Worked example: Correcting a single-consonant reading
Champollion read the sign in the middle of Ramesses' name as m. Lepsius showed it is ms. Why does the name still come out as Ramesses?
- Champollion read sun + m + s + s: Ra-m-s-s.
- Lepsius: the sun (rꜥ), then ms, then s and s. The first s repeats the s of ms as a phonetic complement; the second writes sw "him": rꜥ-ms-sw, "Ra is the one who bore him".
- Both readings give the same consonants here, which is why the error hid. In other words it mattered: a sign that holds two consonants cannot be read as one.
Answer: The extra s is still there; the correction shows up in other words.
Worked example: Why a new find is the test
Why was a text found in 1866 better proof than the Rosetta Stone itself?
- The rules were worked out from the Rosetta Stone and other known texts, so they fit those texts by design.
- A text found later is an independent test.
- The Canopus Decree read correctly by the old rules, so the rules were right, not just fitted.
Answer: Because no one could have shaped the rules to fit it.
Common mistake
Thinking the decipherment was accepted at once. It was argued over until new texts proved it. Keep the dates in mind: 1822 announced, 1837 corrected, 1866 confirmed.