The Rosetta Stone

by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge

METHOD OF DECIPHERMENT.

The method by which the greater part of the Egyptian alphabet was recovered is this: It was assumed correctly that the oval

, or “cartouche” as it is called, always contained a royal name. There is only one cartouche (five times repeated with slight modifications) on the Rosetta Stone, and this was assumed to contain the name of Ptolemy, because it was certain from the Greek text that the inscription concerned a Ptolemy. It was also assumed that if the cartouche did contain the name of Ptolemy, the characters in it would have the sounds of the Greek letters, and that all together they would represent the Greek form of the name of Ptolemy. Now on the obelisk which Mr. Bankes had brought from Philæ there is an inscription in two languages, Egyptian and Greek. In the Greek portion of it two royal names are mentioned, that is to say, Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and on the second face of the obelisk there are two cartouches, which occur close together, and are filled with hieroglyphs which, it was assumed, formed the Egyptian equivalents of these names. When these cartouches were compared with the cartouche on the Rosetta Stone it was found that one of them contained hieroglyphic characters that were almost identical with those which filled the cartouche on the Rosetta Stone. Thus there was good reason to believe that the cartouche on the Rosetta Stone contained the name of Ptolemy written in hieroglyphic characters. The forms of the cartouches are as follows:

	On the Rosetta Stone
	On the Obelisk from Philæ

The second of these cartouches contains the sign

, which is wanting in the first, and the single sign

takes the place of the three signs

at the end of the first cartouche. Now it has already been said that the name of Cleopatra was found in Greek on the Philæ Obelisk, and the cartouche which was assumed to contain the Egyptian equivalent of this name appears in this form:

Taking the cartouches which were supposed to contain the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra from the Philæ Obelisk, and numbering the signs we have:

	Ptolemy, A.
	Cleopatra, B.

Now we see at a glance that No. 1 in A and No. 5 in B are identical, and judging by their position only in the names they must represent the letter P. No. 4 in A and No. 2 in B are identical, and arguing as before from their position they must represent the letter L. As L is the second letter in the name of Cleopatra, the sign No. 1

must represent K. Now in the cartouche of Cleopatra we know the values of Signs Nos. 1, 2 and 5, so we may write them down as thus:

In the Greek form of the name of Cleopatra there are two vowels between the L and the P, and in the hieroglyphic form there are two hieroglyphs,

and

, so we may assume that

= E and

= O. In some forms of the cartouche of Cleopatra No. 7

is replaced by

, which is identical with No. 2 in A and No. 10 in B. As T follows P in the name Ptolemy, and as there is a T in the Greek form of the name of Cleopatra, we may assume that

and

have substantially the same sound, and that that sound is T. In the Greek form of the name Cleopatra there are two a’s, the positions of which agree with No. 6 and No. 9, and we may assume that

has the value of A. Substituting these values for the hieroglyphs in B we may write it as thus:

Thomas Young noticed that the two signs

always followed the name of a goddess, queen, or princess, and the other early decipherers regarded the two signs as a mere feminine termination. The only sign for which we have no phonetic equivalent is No. 8

and it is obvious that this must represent R. Inserting this value in the cartouche we have the name of Cleopatra deciphered. Applying now the values which we have learned from the cartouche of Cleopatra to the cartouche of Ptolemy we may write it as thus:

We now see that the cartouche must be that of Ptolemy, but it is also clear that there must be contained in it many other hieroglyphs which do not form part of his name. Champollion found other forms of the cartouche of Ptolemy, and the simplest of them was written thus:

. It was therefore evident that the other signs

were royal titles corresponding to those found in the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone meaning “ever-living, beloved of Ptah.” Now the Greek form of the name Ptolemy, i.e. Ptolemaios, ends with S. We may assume therefore that the last sign in the simplest form of the cartouche given above has the phonetic value of S. The only hieroglyphs now doubtful are

and

, and their position in the name of Ptolemy suggests that their phonetic values must be M and some vowel sound in which the I sound predominates. These values, which were arrived at by guessing and deduction, were applied by the early decipherers to other cartouches, e.g.:

	1.
	2.

Now, in No. 1, we can at once write down the values of all the signs, viz., P .  I .  L . A  . T .  R  .  A, which is obviously the Greek name Philotera. In No. 2 we only know some of the hieroglyphs, and we write the cartouche thus:

. Now we know that

occurs in the name Berenice, and that it represents N, and that

is the last word of the transcript of the Greek title “Kaisaros,” and that it therefore represents some S sound. Some of the forms of the cartouche of Cleopatra begin with

, and it is clear that its phonetic value must be K. Inserting these values in the above cartouche we have:

which is clearly meant to represent the name “Alexandros,” or Alexander. The position of the sign

shows that it represented some sound of E or A.

Returning to the signs

which we have assumed to represent the royal titles “ever-living, beloved of Ptah,” we have to decide whether this assumption be correct or not. It was known by tradition and from Coptic Vocabularies that the old Egyptian word for “life” or “living,” was “ānkh,” or “ōnkh,” and that it was represented by the symbol

which occurs several times in the inscriptions. It was therefore guessed that the next signs

meant “ever.” The Coptic Vocabularies state that one of the old Egyptian words for “ever, age, eternity,” was Djet, and as we already know that the phonetic value of the second sign in the word is T, we may assume that the value of

is DJ, or TJ. The third sign

is a “determinative,” and was not pronounced. Thus the first title

means “living ever,” or “ever-living.” Of the remaining signs

we know that the two first are P and T, i.e. the first two letters of the name of Ptah; the third sign

must then have the value of H or something like it. If the signs

form the name of Ptah, then the sign which follows them must mean “loving,” or “loved.” Here again the Coptic helped the early decipherers in assigning a phonetic value to

, for the Coptic word for to love is “mere,” ϻϵρϵ, and they assumed that the value of the sign was “mer.” Now in the cartouche of Ptolemy on the Rosetta Stone after the name Ptah

, we have the signs

, and these are, clearly, a variant of

. We already know that

= I, and therefore

must be the equivalent of

and have the value of “mer.” By the comparison of texts containing variant forms, and by the skilful use of his knowledge of Coptic, Champollion succeeded in formulating the system of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs that is, substantially, that in use at the present day.