Archaeology and ScriptsDecipherment

Champollion's Breakthrough

In 1822 Champollion read Ptolemy and Cleopatra, then Ramesses and Thutmose in older cartouches, and announced his results in the Lettre à M. Dacier.

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Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) had studied languages since boyhood, Coptic most of all. He read Young's work and went further. In 1822 he showed that the same sound signs spelled the names of Greek and Roman rulers in many inscriptions, and then that they also spelled the names of native pharaohs who had lived long before any Greek came to Egypt.

Key idea

Champollion compared the cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, found the signs they shared, and built a list of sound signs. Reading copies of cartouches from Abu Simbel, he found the same signs in native names: Ramesses and Thutmose. On 27 September 1822 he read his Lettre à M. Dacier to the Academy in Paris, setting out the sound signs of Greek and Roman names.

Why it works

Two names that share sounds should share signs. Ptolemaios and Kleopatra both contain p, o and l, so if both cartouches are sound spellings, the signs for p, o and l should appear in both, in the right positions. They do. The test also turned up a surprise: Ptolemy writes t with a loaf, Cleopatra with a hand. Champollion concluded that a sound could have more than one sign, which is true.
Cleopatra's cartouche from the Philae obelisk: k, l, e, o, p, a, t (the hand), r, a, then the feminine t and the egg for a woman's name.
The cross-check that proved the sound values.
SoundPtolemyCleopatra
pstool (1st sign)stool (5th sign)
olasso (3rd sign)lasso (4th sign)
llion (4th sign)lion (2nd sign)
tloafhand: another sign for a t sound

Native names

Copies of temple inscriptions from Abu Simbel showed a cartouche with a sun disk, then an unknown sign, then two signs that he knew as s from Ptolemy. In Coptic the word for "sun" is ⲣⲏ (rē), and the unknown sign looked like the one in a word the Greek text glossed as "birth", Coptic ⲙⲓⲥⲉ (mise). Ra-mes-s: Ramesses, a native king. A second cartouche began with the ibis of the god Thoth: Thoth-mes, Thutmose. Champollion's later accounts date this to September 1822; some historians think the full reading came months later. Either way, sound signs were not just for foreigners.

Ramesses: the sun (rꜥ), ms, and s. The modern reading is rꜥ-ms-sw; the sign Champollion read as m is ms.

Worked example: Which sign is p?

Ptolemy's name has p first; Cleopatra's has p fifth. Which sign must be p?
  1. Find the sign that is first in Ptolemy.
  2. Check the fifth sign in Cleopatra. Both are the reed stool.
  3. The stool is p in both places, so the value is confirmed.

Answer: The stool.

Worked example: A native name

The cartouche shows the ibis of Thoth, then the ms sign, then s. Why does this reading matter more than Ptolemy?
  1. Thoth is an Egyptian god, and the name means "Thoth is born". This king, Thutmose, was a pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, more than a thousand years before the Ptolemies.
  2. So sound signs were part of the Egyptian system from long before Greek rule, not a trick for foreign names.
  3. That meant every inscription, of every period, could now be read.

Answer: It shows that sound signs spelled native Egyptian names, so the whole script was readable.

Champollion's working life: the stone was found when he was eight; he died ten years after the Lettre.

Common mistake

Thinking Champollion read only Greek names. Ptolemy and Cleopatra were the test; the breakthrough was reading native names like Ramesses with the same sound signs. Ask of any reading: is it a foreign name, or Egyptian?

Practice

Pass with 3 right answers, the last 2 in a row. Each right answer earns 2 XP.

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Sources and further reading

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