In the summer of 394 AD, someone carved a line of hieroglyphs into a wall at the temple of Philae, in southern Egypt.
Nobody knows who. It is the last dated hieroglyphic inscription anyone has ever found.
After that, silence. For the next fourteen centuries, Europe looked at Egyptian writing and saw pictures, and assumed pictures meant ideas.
They were reading a phonetic alphabet as if it were a mood board.
The Rosetta Stone turned up in 1799, dug out of a wall by Napoleon's soldiers near the town of Rashid. The same decree, carved three times: hieroglyphs at the top, demotic Egyptian in the middle, Greek at the bottom.
Everyone could read the Greek. So in theory, everyone had the answer key.
It still took twenty-three years.
Jean-François Champollion had been obsessed since he was a teenager. He had done something none of his rivals bothered with: he learned Coptic — the last living descendant of ancient Egyptian, still used in Egyptian church liturgy.
That was the whole trick. Champollion wasn't decoding a puzzle. He was listening for a language he already partly knew.
In September 1822 he was comparing the name "Ramesses" when it resolved. The sun-disc sign read ra. Then signs he recognised as mes. Ra-mes-ses — and in Coptic, mise means "to give birth to". Ra has given birth to him.
The signs weren't ideas. They were sounds, and the sounds were a language with living grandchildren.
What I keep coming back to isn't the cleverness. It's that fourteen hundred years of failure had one cause: everyone assumed a writing system they couldn't read must work differently from the ones they could.
It didn't. It was just writing, doing what writing does.
The longer version is on the blog, with the sources and what Young actually got right.
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