Talk:Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts

old talk

The writing in this article needs to be improved.--76.203.125.247 18:09, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

The actual decipherment of hieroglyphic writing needs to be finalized in the article. Who accomplished the feat, and when it finally happened are not clearly explained. Dr. Dan (talk) 05:14, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Not only is there essentially no discussion of Champollion and Young, the two people who actually actually deciphered the hieroglyphics, but the strange fixation on the Arab work, which while perhaps inspired, did nothing as far as I can tell to contribute to the final decipherment, seems odd and out of balance.Elakazal (talk) 05:44, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Why was Decipherment needed?

We need to add reasons as to why decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphics were so important. This can be achieved by adding information of archaeological finds which were not understood until the full decipherment in 1820. --LostOverThere (talk) 07:59, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Copyvio

Substantial portions of this article dating from 2006 are copied verbatim from http://www.andrewfanous.com/CopticCorner/CopticLanguage1.htm which carries a copyright date of 2003. 192.91.172.36 (talk) 01:43, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Merge into Egyptian hieroglyphics

I propose that this article be merged into either Egyptian hieroglyphs, or, if expanded to a more general overview of decipherment, Hieroglyph. There are several reasons for such a move - this article is thin on content and sourcing, and is largely overlapping information already in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the title is somewhat confusing since the article text deals exclusively with Egyptian hieroglyphs, but other historical hieroglyph systems exist and were deciphered at different times by different individuals, and finally, this article seems to place undue weight on the importance of incomplete Islamic attempts at decipherment. Dialectric (talk) 21:31, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree that the article is weak, but I suggest it's better to improve it. The decipherment was a complex historical story involving several individuals (so it doesn't fit neatly into the biography of any one of them) and too long and distracting to be a section of the Egyptian hieroglyphs article, which has to focus on the hieroglyphic system as it's now understood. I hope to improve this article while also working on Rosetta Stone.

I also agree the title isn't ideal. Since each script is different, each decipherment is different, so maybe this article should move to Decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Andrew Dalby 12:52, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

I support the idea of moving this article to Decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, as an alternative to a merge. Dialectric (talk) 13:27, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Suggest section on the reaction of the Catholic Church

Even if it's only a few sentences, I think it's a significant factor worth noting that the Catholic Church was threatened by Champolllion's expedition to Egypt due to the possibility that he might pre date some of the Hieroglyphs to the Great Flood( Noah's Ark). If this happened it would discredit biblical history as everything was supposed to be destroyed by the Great Flood and no civilization was capable of surviving it, (supposedly). Supposedly, the church asked Champillion to censor his findings if he found any records that predated the flood and one of the conditions of his expedition, an ultimatum given to him by the French government, was that he abide by this condition.

The problem is I cannot find any sources at the moment except this documentary from the BBC; Egypt:Secrets of the Hieroglyphs which I saw on youtube.

Actually, the church was a big fan of Napoleon, naming him a Defender of the Faith because of his decipherment of hieroglyphs believed to be present flanking the Dendera zodiac, which showed the zodiac to be Ptolemaic, not tens of thousands of years old as many were saying. (The translation proved to be based on an incorrect transcription, though the conclusion was correct). Although ultimately Champollion's discoveries clashed with church dogma, I don't think it wasn't until much later that the church became concerned about him.Elakazal (talk) 05:44, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Apparently Champollion did in fact keep some of his findings secret and it wasn't until his death that these facts were revealed. If someone can find a source for any of this, it would be helpful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Braineater30 (talk • contribs) 18:59, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Decipherment?

I did not realize Egyption hieroglyphs were a cypher. A cypher is a character or symbol substitution scheme intended to obfuscate the original message. Perhaps "translate" is a better choice. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brett h l (talk • contribs) 12:22, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

"Decipherment" is the usual word for finding the key to, or making sense of, a form of writing that was previously not understood. "Translation" is a different thing: it means turning words or sentences in one language into another language. In the case of ancient Egyptian, the script had to be deciphered before the texts could be translated: the two processes are not the same. Andrew Dalby 18:26, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I disagree. The key understanding of cypher is "obfuscate". Were the ancient Egyptian writings a cypher? In other words were they intended to encrypt? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brett h l (talk • contribs) 23:49, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

The word "decipher" means "to find the meaning of (something that is difficult to read or understand)" and "decipherment" is absolutely correct here. See, for instance, Maurice Pope's book describing the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and other ancient writing systems, The Story of Decipherment.

Uffda a la mode (talk) 23:04, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

sources

There is a lot more to be said I found this at Questia Wilson, Penelope (2004-08-12). Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction. OUP Oxford. ISBN 9780192805027. Retrieved 12 November 2014. J8079s (talk) 18:49, 12 November 2014 (UTC

This is interesting too Horapollo; Cory, Alexander Turner (1840). The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous. W. Pickering. Retrieved 13 November 2014.

One more Gordon, Cyrus Herzl (1982). Forgotten Scripts: Their Ongoing Discovery and Deciperment/#1499748. Basic Books. ISBN 9780465024841. Retrieved 3 March 2015. I got these at Questia J8079s (talk) 05:35, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

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Decipherment & Horapollon

The problem with this article is, that "decipherment" normally means, that someone is able to find the phonetical values of characters or letters. That's why Horapollo's "Hieroglyphica" are considered wrong or at least misleading. He is not giving any phonetical values, but translations. Van de Walle and Vergote in their edition 1943 (French) have shown, that most translations are correct. You can easily prove this by comparing Horapollo's Greek explanations with modern Egyptian dictionaries. The misconception is, that the phonetical values are considered necessary for understanding or translating a Hieroglyphical text. They are not and Horapollo was right. Non-the-less Champollion had finally cracked the code completely, not by adding phonetical values, but by demonstrating, that the Hieroglyphs are a complex system, that has ideographic and phonetical uses and not by breaking away from the methods of his predecessors, but by completing them, especially by using Chinese characters as examples (with the help of Abel Remusat). This means, you can translate an Egyptian text completely without knowing the phonetical values. So a "decipherment" in the strict sense is not necessary.--36.97.187.211 (talk) 12:45, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Um, no, it really isn't possible to decipher a hieroglyphic text without knowing the phonetic values. Phonetic signs make up the bulk of any given hieroglyphic text. From Middle Egyptian by James P. Allen, page 29: "Contrary to popular belief (and the general opinion of scholars before hieroglyphs were deciphered), writing with ideograms was the exception in hieroglyphic, rather than the rule. Even words that we might imagine could have been written with an ideogram often used phonograms instead." The text goes on to say that determinatives, which give some indication of the meaning of the word, were often appended to words that were written phonetically, but they were omitted in prepositions and other very common words. Reading a whole hieroglyphic text is thus impossible without reading the phonetic signs and knowing the underlying language. A. Parrot (talk) 01:08, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

You don't need to read an Egyptian text aloud. We don't know the original pronunciation anyhow. The pronunciation James P. Allen, Alan Gardiner, Adolf Erman et al. are giving is artificial and not historically true. Just compare Horapollon with the Berlin Woerterbuch, Hannig's Woerterbuch et al. and you will see (as van de Walle and Vergote have seen before), that the meaning is in most cases correct. Champollion knew this very well and organized his own dictionary according to determinatives, like the Chinese dictionaries (Shuowen Jiezi and Kangxi according to 部首 bu shou. He only gave the Coptic writing to give a hint to the pronunciation. Richard Lepsius transformed most of Champollion's ideogrammes into "2-consonantal-' and "3-consonantal-signs", what was unnecessary and confusing.--36.97.187.211 (talk) 17:53, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

You're making so many wrong claims, I'm not sure where to start. I suppose I can start by saying what you're right about: Horapollo does contain some correct ideographic meanings, and it's impossible to fully reconstruct the pronunciation of the Egyptian language. But those points don't matter, because most of any given hieroglyphic text will be phonetic, and you have to be able to correlate the consonants that underlie each phonetic sign with each other, whether you can accurately pronounce them or not.

Lepsius did not label ideograms as biliteral and triliteral signs. (A lot of signs that function as biliterals and triliterals also function as ideograms, but that's not the same thing.) Champollion thought the signs that Lepsius labeled as biliterals and triliterals were simple uniliteral signs, with the result that Champollion believed there were far more ways to spell a single sound than there really were. Lepsius's modifications to Champollion's system are said to have rendered it genuinely workable for the first time and are integral to the modern understanding of hieroglyphs (see A History of Egyptology, Volume 1 by Jason Thompson, p. 199, and Cracking the Egyptian Code by Andrew Robinson, pp. 243–245). Therefore, I can only conclude that you're arguing against the scholarly consensus of the past 180 years or so, which Wikipedia is not the place for. In any case, Wikipedia talk pages are for discussing improvements to articles, not for discussion of the topic itself. Is there a specific change that you want to make to this article? A. Parrot (talk) 01:37, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

DYK nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Yoninah (talk) 20:40, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

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• Comment or view
• Article history

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Champollion in 1823

• ... that after making a breakthrough in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Jean-François Champollion (pictured) cried "I've done it!" and collapsed in a faint that lasted days? Source: "…Jean-François ran from his house in the Rue Mazarine to the nearby Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, flung a bundle of drawings down onto a desk in Jacques-Joseph's office, and cried: 'Je tiens mon affaire!' ('I've done it!')—his own version of Archimedes' cry 'Eureka!' But before he could explain what he had done, he collapsed on the floor in a dead faint. For an instant, his brother feared that he was dead. Taken home to rest, Champollion apparently did not revive until evening-time five days later…" (Cracking the Egyptian Code [2012] by Andrew Robinson, p. 142)

• Reviewed: Dacrydium guillauminii

5x expanded by A. Parrot (talk). Self-nominated at 01:12, 27 August 2019 (UTC).

• Article has been 5x expanded recently enough, no copyvio, the source supports the content of the hook, and the source is cited in the article after the relevant passage. Article looks really well-done and interesting. Sure you don't want to add a picture? Enwebb (talk) 15:36, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

@Enwebb: I usually don't, given that there can only be one picture for every eight hooks, but File:Portrait de Champollion Le Jeune par Madame de Rumilly cropped.jpg would work. Should I change the blurb to add it and the word (pictured)? A. Parrot (talk) 00:24, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

I know there's no guarantee of having the picture included with the hook on the main page, but I think it could be nice to add the portrait just in case. Enwebb (talk) 22:19, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

@Enwebb: I've added it; hope I've done it correctly. A. Parrot (talk) 22:31, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Looks great! And I have ensured that the image is used in the article in question and that it is licensed appropriately. Enwebb (talk) 22:34, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

British English

Just noting that I've tried to use British English in this article, even though I'm American, because the only English-speaking figures mentioned in the article were British. A. Parrot (talk) 22:59, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Context of dates

"ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD". What was going on in Egypt at the time? Why was meaning lost. I've just been to Egypt to look, and they don't seem to have any dates, so it's not possible to work it out from there.