| Alright! Let's look at Egyptian Hieroglyphs. |
| Egyptian Hieroglyphs are the ancient Egyptian writings |
| found in ancient Egypt on walls, monuments and on the inside and outside of temples. |
| Hieroglyphic writing ended abruptly about 1600 years ago, |
| and it mystified a lot of people in the study of Egyptian artifacts and archaeology for many many centuries. |
| In 1799, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab |
| inscribed with ancient Egyptian writing near the town of Rosetta. |
| The Rosetta Stone is arguably the most famous archaeological artifact ever discovered. |
| It is written in three scripts being used in Egypt. |
| The first was hieroglyphic which was the script used for important or religious documents. |
| The second was demotic which was the common script of Egypt |
| and was used for more mundane matters like administrative documents. |
| The third was Greek which was the language of the rulers of Egypt at that time. |
| Now here is an important part to remember: |
| Hieroglyphic and the demotic were replaced by Coptic scripts, |
| and eventually, the Arabic language replaced Coptic, |
| and this cut off the linguistic link between ancient and modern Egypt |
| and make it difficult for scholars to decipher. |
| Thomas Young, an English scholar, |
| was the first to seriously attempt to decipher the symbols on the Rosetta Stone. |
| He suspected that the hieroglyphs were phonetic symbols, |
| that they represented its sounds rather than pictures. |
| Until then, all scholars assumed that hieroglyphs were pictographs, |
| that they symbolize objects or concepts. |
| Thomas Young focused his attention on one set of hieroglyphs |
| that he thought would probably spell out a single word: the name of a King or Queen. |
| He guessed that the symbols represented the name of the early Egyptian ruler - Ptolemy, |
| since Ptolemy was also written in Greek on the stone and was indeed a Greek name. |
| And Young did actually prove that these hieroglyphs represented sounds rather than whole words. |
| However, he finally dismissed his own findings as an anomaly |
| because the Ptolemaic dynasty was Greek, not Egyptian. |
| In other words, he figured it was an exception to the rule. |
| It was phonetic because it was Greek, not Egyptian. |
| How else could an Egyptian depict a Greek name other than spell it out? |
| It wasn't until 1822 |
| that another scholar called Champollion made a breakthrough in the decipherment of the Rosetta hieroglyphs, |
| showing that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs. |
| You see, unlike any of the other scholars who had tried to crack the code, |
| Champollion could read both Greek and Coptic. |
| He was able to figure out what the seven demotic signs in Coptic were. |
| By looking at how these signs were used in Coptic, |
| he was able to work out what they stood for. |
| Then he began tracing these demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs. |
| By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, |
| he could make educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs stood for. |