Hieroglyphics

1. Hieroglyphics

2. What are Hieroglyphics? • Hieroglyphics was the writing system used in Ancient Egypt on all the major monuments, tombs and temples. Only priests, scribes and craftsmen working on stone monuments had been taught to understand it. • By the late fourth century AD, there was not much use for hieroglyphics, as only priests would have known what the different symbols actually meant. When the priests died, people thought this knowledge had died too.

4. The Rosetta Stone • In 1799, at the Egyptian coastal town of Rosetta, a French soldier found a slab of black granite-like rock with the same message carved on it in three different scripts: • Ancient Greek, a language well known to educated people at that time. • Egyptian, demotic (an everyday) • hieroglyphics. • The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, meant there was a possibility that, by comparing ancient Greek and demotic, hieroglyphics could be translated for the first time.

6. A breakthrough • Champollion proved his theory by decoding the name ‘Cleopatra’ on the Philae obelisk, a stone column with inscriptions in ancient Greek and hieroglyphics. • The real breakthrough was in 1824 when Champollion realised that hieroglyphs sometimes stood for alphabetic sounds, sometimes for syllables and sometimes for whole ideas or objects.

7. Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) • A French scholar, passionate in his desire to learn about ancient Egypt. • Spent 14 years trying to solve this mystery-forming, testing, rejecting and re-forming possible solutions. • He was able to confirm that foreign names in ancient Egypt had to be written phonetically (in symbols that correspond to sounds).

8. Hieroglyphic alphabet

9. Now it’s your turn. Question: Write a paragraph to explain howthe discovery of the Rosetta Stone was important in discovering the language hieroglyphics.