It might be supposed that with this clew the work of decipherment would be readily accomplished. On the contrary, many of the most distinguished scholars of Europe tried, during the twenty following years, without success.
The chief obstacle in the way was the prevailing opinion that the pictorial forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs were mainly ideographic symbols of things. In consequence, the absurd conceptions read into these characters, led all who attempted the decipherment of these far away from the truth.
It is true that Zoega, a Danish archæologist, and Thomas Young, an English scholar, each independently, about 1787, had made the discovery that the hieroglyphs in the ovals represented royal names, and were perhaps alphabetic; but the signification of these characters were never fully comprehended by either of these great scholars.
The claim made by the friends of Mr. Young as the first discoverer of the true methods of decipherment, rests upon the fact that he gave the true phonetic values to five of these characters in the spelling of the names of certain royal personages, and in 1819 published an article announcing this discovery. He seems, however, to have had so little confidence in this conception that he went no farther with it, and still later, in 1823, lost the prestige he might have gained, by the publication as his belief, that the Egyptians never made use of signs to express sound until the time of the Roman and Greek invasions of Egypt.
The real work of decipherment was reserved for Champollion, who, born at Grenoble, in 1790, was but nine years old when the famous stone was discovered which later on was to yield to him the long lost language of the hieroglyphs.
Among the characters on the Rosetta Stone, in the hieroglyphic text, were to be found certain pictorial forms enclosed in an oval. It had hitherto been suggested that these ovals contained characters signifying royal names. Were these symbolic signs, or how were they to be interpreted? Champollion concluded that some of these signs expressed sound and were alphabetic in character. Thus, if the signs in the cartouche supposed to signify Ptolemy, could be found to be identical, letter for letter, with the Ptolemaios of the Greek inscription, an important proof would be obtained. It so happened that on an obelisk found at Philæ there was a hieroglyphic inscription, which, according to a Greek text on the same shaft should be that of Cleopatra. If, then, the signs for P, t and l in Ptolemaios corresponded with the signs for p, t and l in Cleopatra, the identity of these as alphabetic signs would be confirmed. The comparison fully justified his theory, and further confirmation was supplied by further comparisons, until he finally came into possession of hieroglyphic signs for all the consonants.
Again; certain indications convinced him that these characters appearing in proper names must be also initial letters or initial sounds of Egyptian words of which these signs were the pictorial representations. If this was so, the sign for the letter L, which in the royal names was the picture of a lion, must be the beginning of some word signifying “lion,” which in old Egyptian would begin with the letter or first syllabic sound of L.
The pictorial sign for the letter R was the mouth. The word for mouth, then, in Egyptian must begin with the letter or syllabic sign for R, and so forth.
The early opportunities which Champollion had enjoyed for the preparation of his great work were peculiarly significant. He was educated by his elder brother, a man of great learning, professor of Greek in the Academy of Grenoble, whose companionship early influenced the direction of his younger brother to linguistic studies. In addition to this, the intense interest aroused throughout Europe by the vast collection of antiquities brought thither by the men of letters and science who accompanied Napoleon’s army in Egypt, had compelled the attention of scholars to this special field of research as never before.
With this guidance, and moved by the spirit of the times, Champollion’s studies in ancient Greek led him to an early acquaintance with the Coptic language. It is said that, as a result of this study, at the age of sixteen he read a paper before his academy, maintaining that the Coptic was the language of the ancient Egyptians. This is not now a spoken language, having been supplanted by the Arabic since the seventeenth century, A. D. It, however, survives in the service ritual of the Coptic churches of to-day, and, though written in old Greek characters, the ancient language is still heard, though but few understand it.