The Rosetta Stone reached London in 1802. Copies of its texts went to scholars all over Europe. One of the first to make real progress was the English physician and physicist Thomas Young (1773–1829), already famous for showing that light behaves as a wave.
Key idea
Why it works
Young's method was comparison. He lined up the texts, counted how often words recurred, and found about 80 matches between hieroglyphic and Demotic groups. Working from royal names such as Ptolemy's, he proposed sound values for 13 signs. By a modern count, six were right, three partly right and four wrong. He also thought sound spelling was used only for foreign names like Ptolemy, while native Egyptian words were written with symbols. That last idea held him back.
Worked example: Finding the name
- Look for a group of signs that repeats in the hieroglyphic text about as often as Ptolemy's name repeats in the Greek.
- Notice that one repeated group is inside an oval frame, the cartouche, and royal names are what an Egyptian decree would honor.
- Check the position: the group appears where, by the order of the Greek, the name should be.
Answer: By matching a repeated, framed group to the repeated name in the Greek.
Worked example: Sounds in a foreign name
- The Greek name begins with p, so the first sign, the stool, should be p.
- Test it on another name that contains p, such as Cleopatra: the same stool sign should appear in the position of p.
- A value that works in two different names is unlikely to be a coincidence.
Answer: p, tested by finding the same sign in another name with p.
Common mistake