How we learned to read hieroglyphs

For roughly fourteen hundred years, the writing covering Egypt's monuments was completely unreadable. Not difficult — unreadable. The last person able to write hieroglyphs died some time around the fourth or fifth century, and with them went the ability to interpret a civilisation's entire written record. Temples covered in text stood in plain sight, saying nothing at all.

Recovering that ability is one of the great intellectual detective stories, and it turned on getting a single question right after centuries of getting it wrong.

The wrong assumption

The obstacle was not lack of effort. Scholars had studied hieroglyphs for centuries. The problem was that almost everyone approached them with a shared assumption that happened to be false.

Because the signs are pictures — birds, hands, water, reeds — it seemed self-evident that each stood for an idea. A drawing of an owl meant an owl, or wisdom, or night. Under this reading, hieroglyphic writing was a symbolic code expressing concepts directly, without reference to any spoken language.

This view was reinforced by a late antique text, the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, which offered elaborate mystical explanations for individual signs. It was treated as authoritative for over a thousand years and was substantially wrong. Generations of scholars produced ingenious symbolic interpretations of texts that actually said things like tax records and royal names.

The stone

In 1799, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rashid — Rosetta to Europeans — found a slab of dark stone bearing three blocks of writing. The top was hieroglyphic, the middle a cursive Egyptian script called demotic, the bottom ancient Greek.

The Greek was readable, and it revealed the text to be a fairly unremarkable priestly decree from 196 BC, issued in the reign of Ptolemy V. Its dullness was irrelevant. What mattered was the strong likelihood that the three blocks said approximately the same thing, which meant a known language sat alongside two unknown scripts.

The stone passed to British hands after the French defeat in Egypt and has been in the British Museum since 1802, its ownership contested to this day. Copies circulated widely among European scholars almost immediately, and the race began.

Two men, one correct guess

The English polymath Thomas Young made the crucial early break. He worked on the cartouches — the oval rings drawn around certain groups of signs — reasoning correctly that these enclosed royal names. Since a foreign name like Ptolemy could not be represented by native Egyptian concept-symbols, the signs inside had to be recording sounds.

Young established that hieroglyphs were at least partly phonetic, which was a genuine breakthrough. But he continued to regard this as a special case, an exception made for foreign words within an otherwise symbolic system. That reservation stopped him going further.

Jean-Francois Champollion, a French scholar who had studied Egypt since childhood, took the decisive step. Critically, he had learned Coptic — the language of Egypt's Christian communities, which descends directly from ancient Egyptian and survived in liturgical use. This gave him something no purely symbolic approach could: a sense of what the underlying language might actually sound like.

Working on cartouches from other monuments, he identified the name of Ramesses and recognised that the signs were spelling it out phonetically — and that these were native Egyptian names, not foreign ones. The phonetic principle was not an exception. It was the system. In 1822 he set out the argument in a letter to the French academy, and the field opened.

What the system turned out to be

The reason it resisted for so long is that hieroglyphic writing is genuinely mixed, and both of the competing simple theories were partly right.

Some signs are phonetic, representing consonant sounds much as letters do. Some are logographic, standing for a whole word. And some are determinatives — silent signs added at the end of a word to indicate its category, distinguishing otherwise identical spellings. A single word might combine all three.

The script also omits most vowels, writes in either direction depending on layout, and can be arranged in columns or rows. Reading direction is signalled by which way the animal and human signs face: they look toward the beginning of the line.

This is why the symbolic theory survived so long. Anyone examining the signs could find plenty that behaved as pictures, because plenty do. The error was concluding that this was the whole system.

Why it mattered

Before 1822, ancient Egypt was known almost entirely through Greek and Roman accounts written by outsiders, often centuries after the events described. Afterwards, Egypt could speak for itself.

What emerged was less mystical and far more human than the symbolic tradition had imagined. Alongside temple inscriptions came letters, contracts, medical texts, school exercises, complaints about working conditions, and the records of a village of tomb-builders at Deir el-Medina that document ordinary life in extraordinary detail — including what appears to be one of the earliest recorded labour strikes.

There is a lesson in the shape of the failure. The obstacle was never a shortage of evidence or intelligence. It was a plausible assumption, adopted early, that made the evidence fit a wrong picture for fourteen centuries. The breakthrough came from someone willing to test whether the assumption itself was the problem.