Page "Rosetta Stone" Paragraph 44

In 1814, Young first exchanged correspondence about the stone with Jean-François Champollion, a teacher at Grenoble who had produced a scholarly work on ancient Egypt.

Champollion, in 1822, saw copies of the brief hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions of the Philae obelisk, on which William John Bankes had tentatively noted the names " Ptolemaios " and " Kleopatra " in both languages.

From this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters k l e o p a t r a ( in today's transliteration ).

On the basis of this and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters, which appears, printed from his hand-drawn chart, in his " Lettre à M. Dacier ", addressed at the end of 1822 to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the Paris Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and immediately published by the Académie.

This " Letter " marks the real breakthrough to reading Egyptian hieroglyphs, for not only the alphabet chart and the main text, but also the postscript in which Champollion notes that similar phonetic characters seemed to occur in not only Greek names but also native Egyptian names.

During 1823, he confirmed this, identifying the names of pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose written in cartouches in far older hieroglyphic inscriptions that had been copied by Bankes at Abu Simbel and sent on to Champollion by Jean-Nicolas Huyot.

From this point, the stories of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs diverge, as Champollion drew on many other texts to develop a first Ancient Egyptian grammar and a hieroglyphic dictionary, both of which were to be published after his death.