Page "Rosetta Stone" Paragraph 40

At the time of the stone's discovery, the Swedish diplomat and scholar Johan David Åkerblad was working on a little-known script of which some examples had recently been found in Egypt, which came to be known as Demotic.

He called it " cursive Coptic " because, although it had few similarities with the later Coptic script, he was convinced that it was used to record some form of the Coptic language ( the direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian ).

The French Orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, who had been discussing this work with Åkerblad, received in 1801 from Jean-Antoine Chaptal, French minister of the interior, one of the early lithographic prints of the Rosetta Stone, and realised that the middle text was in this same script.

He and Åkerblad set to work, both focusing on the middle text and assuming that the script was alphabetic.

They attempted, by comparison with the Greek, to identify within this unknown text the points where Greek names ought to occur.

In 1802, Silvestre de Sacy reported to Chaptal that he had successfully identified five names (" Alexandros ", " Alexandreia ", " Ptolemaios ", " Arsinoe " and Ptolemy's title " Epiphanes "), while Åkerblad published an alphabet of 29 letters ( more than half of which were correct ) that he had identified from the Greek names in the demotic text.

They could not, however, identify the remaining characters in the Demotic text, which, as is now known, included ideographic and other symbols alongside the phonetic ones.

In 2012, however, the University of Chicago published the first translation of the three languages with its Demotic dictionary .< Ref > http :// www. aljazeera. com / video / middleeast / 2012 / 09 / 2012918204348950439. html </ ref >