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The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 by members of Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt, bore a parallel text in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. It was hoped that the Egyptian text could be deciphered through its Greek translation, especially in combination with the evidence from the Coptic language , the last stage of the Egyptian language .
The Egyptian hieroglyphs had been well-known to scholars of the ancient world for centuries, but few had made any attempts to understand them. Many based their speculations about the script in the writings of Horapollon who considered the symbols to be ideographic, not representing any specific spoken language.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (/ ˈ h aɪ r oʊ ˌ ɡ l ɪ f s / HY-roh-glifs) [1] [2] were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic , logographic , syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters.
Category:Egyptian hieroglyphs: invertebrates and lesser animals (3) M § Trees and plants: Category:Egyptian hieroglyphs: trees and plants (6) N § Sky, earth, water: Category:Egyptian hieroglyphs: sky-earth-water (16) NU § Upper nile: Category:Egyptian hieroglyphs by category (27) NL § Lower nile: Category:Egyptian hieroglyphs by category (27) O
The Rosetta Stone was discovered there in July 1799 by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. It was the first ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, and it aroused widespread public interest with its potential for deciphering this previously untranslated hieroglyphic script.
The letters of the earliest script used for Semitic languages were derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the 19th century, the theory of Egyptian origin competed alongside other theories that the Phoenician script developed from Akkadian cuneiform , Cretan hieroglyphs , the Cypriot syllabary , and Anatolian hieroglyphs . [ 24 ]
Egyptian hieroglyphs were solved using the Rosetta Stone, which was a multilingual stele in Classical Greek, Demotic Egyptian and Classical Egyptian hieroglyphs. The work was done by the French scholar, Jean-François Champollion , and the British scientist Thomas Young .
Gardiner's sign list is a list of common Egyptian hieroglyphs compiled by Sir Alan Gardiner. It is considered a standard reference in the study of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Gardiner lists only the common forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he includes extensive subcategories, and also both vertical and horizontal forms for many hieroglyphs.