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Champollion's interest in Egyptian history and the hieroglyphic script developed at an early age. At the age of sixteen, he gave a lecture before the Grenoble Academy in which he argued that the language spoken by the ancient Egyptians, in which they wrote the Hieroglyphic texts, was closely related to Coptic.
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 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.
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.
Other scholars worked on producing a hieroglyphic dictionary, developing a Demotic lexicon, and establishing an outline of ancient Egyptian history. [ 9 ] In the United States, the founding of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and the expedition of James Henry Breasted to Egypt and Nubia established Egyptology as a legitimate ...
In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered an even earlier version of this first alphabet at Wadi el-Hol dated to circa 1800 BC and showing evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BC, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had been developed about that time. [261]
The history of science is often seen as a linear story of progress [27] but historians have come to see the story as more complex. [ 28 ] [ 29 ] [ 30 ] Alfred Edward Taylor has characterised lean periods in the advance of scientific discovery as "periodical bankruptcies of science".
Epigraphy (from Ancient Greek ἐπιγραφή (epigraphḗ) 'inscription') is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the writing and the writers.