The Adversaries Who Deciphered Ancient Egypt’s Hieroglyphic Script

During July 1799, French soldiers constructing defenses for Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition stumbled upon an unusual black basalt slab. Measuring nearly 4 feet in height and 2.5 feet in width, the stone had rough edges and was covered in inscriptions.

The commanding officer of the troops, a knowledgeable engineer named Pierre-François Bouchard, noticed that the slab contained a message in three distinct scripts. One was Ancient Greek, another was an unidentified language, and the third was hieroglyphs—the sacred script of ancient Egypt, which had remained undeciphered for more than a millennium.

Discovered near the town of Rosetta in the Nile Delta, this stone would become the crucial tool for solving a mystery that had persisted for thousands of years.

For centuries, European scholars aimed to decode the ancient Egyptian script. Greek and Roman authors had attributed mystical significance to Egyptian culture, and early modern explorers returning from Egypt brought sculptures adorned with enigmatic hieroglyphs, reinforcing the belief in Egypt's connection to esoteric wisdom. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign further fueled academic curiosity about the origins of the pyramids, temples, and writing system.

Bouchard commanded that the slab be safeguarded for Napoleon's expanding collection of Egyptian artifacts. However, the French were defeated by British forces in 1801, leading to the seizure of their Egyptian spoils, including the Rosetta Stone, which was presented to King George III as a gift.

Before losing the invaluable artifact, French scholars had replicated the inscriptions, distributing them across Europe. Within the next decade, linguists determined that the top inscription was in hieroglyphs, a script that had vanished by the 4th century CE, along with the ability to read it. The middle section was in demotic script, used by ordinary Egyptians. The Ancient Greek text at the bottom, a decree from Ptolemy V in 196 BCE, confirmed that all three inscriptions conveyed the same message.

In 1814, when the brilliant British polymath Thomas Young began deciphering the stone, he was unaware that Jean-François Champollion, an equally gifted French linguist, had already been studying the hieroglyphs for years. This marked the start of a fierce competition to unlock the ancient code.

The Enigma of Hieroglyphs

By the age of 18, Thomas Young had mastered 12 languages and pursued medical studies at Cambridge University. Living up to his nickname “Phenomenon,” given by his peers, Young later delved into various scientific fields, earning a prominent place in the Royal Society and the Royal Institution. His interest in the Rosetta Stone was sparked after reading a book on the evolution of languages.

Young carried a copy of the stone’s inscriptions during a holiday to Worthing, a seaside town, where he treated the decipherment like a mathematical challenge. He dissected the text into individual lines, attempting to align them. However, this method had its limits. He remained uncertain whether hieroglyphs represented a spoken language or if the symbols corresponded to sounds, letters, words, or abstract ideas.

Despite slow progress, Young persisted, concentrating on the demotic script to unravel the hieroglyphs. Between 1816 and 1818, he authored esteemed articles on Egypt for the Encyclopedia Britannica, sharing his discoveries about hieroglyphic and demotic writing. True to his Quaker upbringing, Young remained humble, initially publishing his work anonymously—though many in London’s scholarly circles recognized him as the author.

After years of relentless effort, Young achieved a breakthrough—he discovered that the hieroglyphic cartouches (oval-enclosed symbols) held the name of Ptolemy. This revelation enabled him to align the ancient Greek letters in Ptolemy’s name with their hieroglyphic counterparts. In 1819, he published a paper proposing tentative phonetic sounds for 13 hieroglyphs, marking the first significant leap in decoding the script. Using these findings, Young began translating both hieroglyphs and demotic, resurrecting two writing systems lost to time for thousands of years.

A Competition Unfolds

While Young’s interests spanned various fields, Jean-François Champollion was entirely dedicated to Egyptology. Seventeen years younger than Young, the charismatic Frenchman was deeply immersed in the culture and language of ancient Egypt. By the time Young released his decipherment in 1819, Champollion had already spent a decade obsessed with unraveling hieroglyphs. He was convinced that his expertise in Egyptian Coptic—the rare liturgical language of Egypt’s Christian community—gave him an edge over other scholars.

“Thomas Young treated the decipherment like a crossword puzzle, as he lacked deep interest in ancient Egypt,” Diane Josefowicz writes in Riddle of the Rosetta. “Champollion, on the other hand, was deeply passionate about Egyptian history and culture, which led him to extensively utilize Coptic. His knowledge of Coptic proved crucial to unlocking the hieroglyphs.”

Similar to Young, Champollion focused on cartouches as the most promising path to decipherment. Believing hieroglyphs combined ideograms and alphabetic symbols, he applied his fluency in Coptic to decode the cartouches of pharaohs Ramses and Thutmose. After tirelessly translating the symbols, Champollion realized he had solved the mystery and rushed to his brother’s office, exclaiming, “I’ve got it!” before collapsing. As Toby Wilkinson recounts in A World Beneath the Sands, Champollion spent the next five days bedridden from exhaustion.

After deciphering additional cartouches, Champollion developed a comprehensive alphabet of hieroglyphs and their Greek equivalents. He presented his findings at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris on July 27, 1822. Young attended the meeting and met Champollion for the first time. While Young may have expected acknowledgment of his 1819 paper, Champollion made no mention of it, sowing the seeds of resentment in Young.

“He dedicates all his time to this pursuit and has achieved remarkable success with some documents,” Young wrote to his friend Hudson Gurney. “How much he will credit what he borrowed or could have borrowed, I am uncertain. But the world will surely note que c’est le premier pas qui coûte [it is only the first step that is difficult], though in this case, every step is arduous.”

The Competition Intensifies

Stunned by the acclaim for Champollion’s success and concerned his own contributions were being ignored, Young abandoned his usual modesty.

In 1823, Young released his rebuttal, An Account of Some Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature, and Egyptian Antiquities. To emphasize his foundational role in the decipherment, he included a pointed subtitle: Including the author’s original alphabet, as extended by Mr. Champollion. Reflecting on Champollion’s work, Young wrote, “However Mr. Champollion reached his conclusions, I accept them with great pleasure and gratitude, not as replacing my system, but as thoroughly confirming and expanding it.”

Champollion remained unfazed by Young’s pointed remarks and firmly stated his position: “I will never acknowledge any original alphabet other than my own … and the consensus of scholars on this matter will only grow stronger with the public scrutiny of any competing claims.”

Young withdrew from the public dispute, while his British allies criticized Champollion’s “audacity” in the media. In his final years, the polymath focused on compiling a demotic script dictionary. After his death in 1829, his friend Hudson Gurney funded a plaque in London’s Westminster Abbey, honoring Young’s many accomplishments, including being the first to “pierce the veil that had shrouded Egypt’s hieroglyphs for centuries.” Through his friends’ efforts, Young posthumously received recognition for his pioneering work in deciphering ancient Egypt’s language.

Meanwhile, Champollion continued his work on hieroglyphs, supported by wealthy patrons who championed his research. In 1824, he released his definitive treatise, Précis du Système Hiéroglyphique des Anciens Égyptiens, where he revealed that hieroglyphs were simultaneously phonetic, symbolic, and figurative—finally providing the key to reading ancient Egyptian script.

During his lifetime, Champollion was celebrated as the “father of Egyptology.” He solidified his legacy by traveling to Egypt, where he decoded countless inscriptions. However, the toll of his travels damaged his health, leading to his death in 1832 at just 41 years old.

Today, the Rosetta Stone symbolizes the unlocking of profound secrets. A century after Champollion’s breakthrough, British archaeologist Howard Carter opened a sealed door in an ancient Egyptian tomb, revealing the treasures of King Tut and proving that many more mysteries of ancient Egypt remained to be uncovered.

Additional source: A World Beneath the Sands: Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology