question: How and when did we find out what was written on the hieroglyphs on objects and artefacts, i.e. the ancient Egyptian writing system?
comment: We found a stone the was carved in multiple languages and was able to compare the languages that were known and able to translate the stone was known as the Rosetta stone
passages: The study of hieroglyphs continued centuries later, when various modern scholars attempted to decipher the glyphs, notably Johannes Goropius Becanus in the 16th century, Athanasius Kircher in the 17th, and Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Åkerblad and Thomas Young in the early 19th century, each making one important step toward the solution but failing to find it.
   BULLET::::- the Rosetta Stone Series, in Egyptian (using Hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts) and Ancient Greek; they allowed the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs (especially the last one)
  
  BULLET::::- the Raphia Decree (217 BCE; Memphis, Egypt)
  
  BULLET::::- the Decree of Canopus (238–237 BCE; Tanis, Egypt)
  
  BULLET::::- the Rosetta Stone decree (196 BCE; Egypt): the Rosetta Stone and the Nubayrah Stele
  
  BULLET::::- the Cippi of Melqart (2nd century BCE; Malta) in Phoenician and Ancient Greek; discovered in Malta in 1694, the key which allowed French scholar Abbé Barthelemy to decipher the Phoenician script
   Kircher, a student of Coptic and Arabic, had read Ibn Wahshiyya's work in the 17th century and continued the study of hieroglyphs from where Ibn Wahshiyya had left off. Kircher further developed the notion that the last stage of Egyptian could be related to the earlier Egyptian stages. Because he was not able to transliterate or translate hieroglyphs, however, he could not prove this notion.
  
  Section::::French discoveries.
   Many African writing systems have been developed in ancient and recent history, and the continent holds a large quantity of varied orthographies. One of the most notable ancient languages were the Egyptian Hieroglyphs, which were often found carved into walls, as decoration on objects of religious significance and written on wood and papyrus. Hieroglyphs, like many other ancient African dialects, underwent a considerable period of time where there was no verifiable translation. The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, would allow historians to effectively decipher Hieroglyphs and access a new field of Ancient Egyptian history. This field would be undertaken predominantly by European historians. 
   Young made the crucial breakthrough in 1814 when studying the Rosetta Stone. Guessing that hieroglyphs surrounded by a loop were of greater importance, such as representing a pharaoh's name, he was able to discover the phonetics of the corresponding hieroglyphs by comparing the three different scripts. After identifying many of the hieroglyphs' sound values, he set aside his work for reasons not fully understood.
  
  A significant breakthrough was made by Champollion in 1822, as reflected in his well-known "Lettre à M. Dacier":
   The Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor ("). The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years. Many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites (i.e. speakers of an early form of Northwest Semitic ancestral to the Canaanite languages of the Late Bronze Age) who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta.
   The earliest known hieroglyphic date back to the second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called "Scorpion I" (Naqada IIIA period, c. 32nd century BC) recovered at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab) in 1998 or the Narmer Palette, dating to c. 3100 BC, and several recent discoveries that may be slightly older, though these glyphs were based on a much older artistic rather than written tradition. The hieroglyphic script was logographic with phonetic adjuncts that included an effective alphabet. The world's oldest deciphered sentence was found on a seal impression found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BC). There are around 800 hieroglyphs dating back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Eras. By the Greco-Roman period, there are more than 5,000.
   Later attempts at deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs were made by Arab historians in medieval Egypt during the 9th and 10th centuries. By then, hieroglyphs had long been forgotten in Egypt, and were replaced by the Coptic and Arabic alphabets. Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya were among those who attempted to decipher hieroglyphs, and Ibn Wahshiyya recognized that some hieroglyphic signs had phonetic values.
  
  Section::::Early European attempts.
   Most of the forty or so inscriptions have been found among much more numerous hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions, scratched on rocks near and in the turquoise mines and along the roads leading to the temple.
  
  The date of the inscriptions is mostly placed in the 17th or 16th century BC.
  
  Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small human statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script.
   It was not until 1799, with the Napoleonic discovery of a trilingual (i.e. hieroglyphic, Demotic, Greek) stela inscription on the Rosetta Stone, that modern scholars were able to decipher ancient Egyptian literature. The first major effort to translate the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone was made by Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) in 1822. The earliest translation efforts of Egyptian literature during the 19th century were attempts to confirm Biblical events.
   Around the first century AD, the Coptic alphabet started to be used alongside the Demotic script. Coptic is a modified Greek alphabet with the addition of some Demotic signs. Although formal hieroglyphs were used in a ceremonial role until the fourth century, towards the end only a small handful of priests could still read them. As the traditional religious establishments were disbanded, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was mostly lost. Attempts to decipher them date to the Byzantine and Islamic periods in Egypt, but only in the 1820s, after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and years of research by Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, were hieroglyphs substantially deciphered.
   As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a demotic version of the same text in parallel with a Greek translation, plenty of material for falsifiable studies in translation was suddenly available. In the early 19th century, scholars such as Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Åkerblad, and Thomas Young studied the inscriptions on the stone, and were able to make some headway. Finally, Jean-François Champollion made the complete decipherment by the 1820s. In his "Lettre à M. Dacier" (1822), he wrote:
   During the late 6th Dynasty, hieratic was sometimes incised into mud tablets with a stylus, similar to cuneiform. About five hundred of these tablets have been discovered in the governor's palace at Ayn Asil (Balat), and a single example was discovered from the site of Ayn al-Gazzarin, both in the Dakhla Oasis. At the time the tablets were made, Dakhla was located far from centers of papyrus production. These tablets record inventories, name lists, accounts, and approximately fifty letters. Of the letters, many are internal letters that were circulated within the palace and the local settlement, but others were sent from other villages in the oasis to the governor.
   Hieroglyphs retained their pictorial appearance, and classical authors emphasised this aspect, in sharp contrast to the Greek and Roman alphabets. In the 5th century, the priest Horapollo wrote "Hieroglyphica", an explanation of almost 200 glyphs. His work was believed to be authoritative, yet it was misleading in many ways, and this and other works were a lasting impediment to the understanding of Egyptian writing. Later attempts at decipherment were made by Arab historians in medieval Egypt during the 9th and 10th centuries. Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya were the first historians to study hieroglyphs, by comparing them to the contemporary Coptic language used by Coptic priests in their time. The study of hieroglyphs continued with fruitless attempts at decipherment by European scholars, notably Johannes Goropius Becanus in the 16th century, Athanasius Kircher in the 17th, and Georg Zoëga in the 18th. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided critical missing information, gradually revealed by a succession of scholars, that eventually allowed Jean-François Champollion to solve the puzzle that Kircher had called the riddle of the Sphinx.
   As no bilingual texts were available, any such symbolic 'translation' could be proposed without the possibility of verification. It wasn't until Athanasius Kircher in the mid 17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds. Kircher was familiar with Coptic, and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs, but was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols.
  
  The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799 (during ). 
   Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts
  
  The scripts used to write the Egyptian language, including hieroglyphic and demotic, were gradually deciphered during the early 19th century. The most helpful clue was supplied by the discovery in 1799 of the Rosetta Stone, an inscription in three scripts. Building on work by several other scholars, notably Thomas Young, the breakthrough to decipherment was made by Jean-François Champollion.
   The first full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BC). There are around 800 hieroglyphs dating back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Eras. By the Greco-Roman period, there are more than 5,000.
   The Egyptian hieroglyphs had been well known to scholars of the ancient world for centuries, but few had made any attempts to understand them. Many based their speculations about the script in the writings of Horapollon who considered the symbols to be ideographic, not representing any specific spoken language. Athanasius Kircher for example had stated that the hieroglyphs were symbols that "cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks, characters and figures", meaning that the script was in essence impossible to ever decipher. Others considered that the use of the hieroglyphs in Egyptian society was limited to the religious sphere and that they represented esoteric concepts within a universe of religious meaning that was now lost. But Kircher had been the first to suggest that modern Coptic was a degenerate form of the language found in the Egyptian demotic script, and he had correctly suggested the phonetic value of one hieroglyph – that of "mu," the Coptic word for water. With the onslaught of Egyptomania in France in the early 19th century, scholars began approaching the question of the hieroglyphs with renewed interest, but still without a basic idea about whether the script was phonetic or ideographic, and whether the texts represented profane topics or sacred mysticism. This early work was mostly speculative, with no methodology for how to corroborate suggested readings. The first methodological advances were Joseph de Guignes' discovery that cartouches identified the names of rulers, and George Zoëga's compilation of a catalogue of hieroglyphs, and discovery that the direction of reading depended on the direction in which the glyphs were facing.
   The most recently carved hieroglyphic inscription of ancient Egypt known today is found in a temple of Philae, dated precisely to 394 AD during the reign of Theodosius I (r. 379–395 AD). In the 4th century AD, the Hellenized Egyptian Horapollo compiled a survey of almost two hundred Egyptian hieroglyphs and provided his interpretation of their meanings, although his understanding was limited and he was unaware of the phonetic uses of each hieroglyph. This survey was apparently lost until 1415, when the Italian Cristoforo Buondelmonti acquired it at the island of Andros. Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) was the first in Europe to realize that Coptic was a direct linguistic descendant of ancient Egyptian. In his "Oedipus Aegyptiacus", he made the first concerted European effort to interpret the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs, albeit based on symbolic inferences.
   In order to document rongorongo, Barthel visited most of the museums which housed the tablets, of which he made pencil rubbings. With this data he compiled the first corpus of the script, which he published as "Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift" in 1958. He was the first scholar to correctly identify anything in the texts: He showed that two lines in the "Mamari" tablet encode calendrical information. 
   The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions ( "Wādī al-Hawl" 'Ravine of Terror') were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile, at approx. , among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions.
   At the time of the stone's discovery, 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 he was convinced that it was used to record some form of the Coptic language (the direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian), although it had few similarities with the later Coptic script. French Orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy had been discussing this work with Åkerblad when he received one of the early lithographic prints of the Rosetta Stone in 1801 from Jean-Antoine Chaptal, French minister of the interior. He 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 alphabetical. They attempted to identify the points where Greek names ought to occur within this unknown text, by comparing it with the Greek. 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.
   Section::::Proto-Canaanite.:History.
  
  Attempts have repeatedly been made to derive the letters from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but with limited success. In the 19th century there were scholars who subscribed to the theory of the Egyptian origin, while other theories held that the Phoenician script developed from Akkadian cuneiform, Cretan hieroglyphs, the Cypriot syllabary, and Anatolian hieroglyphs.
  
  The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were studied by Alan Gardiner who, based on a short bilingual inscription on a stone sphinx, identified the inscriptions as Semitic, reading ' as "the beloved of the Lady" (' "beloved", with the second "b" and the final "t" of "" "Lady" missing).
   French archaeologist and Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, director of the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, arrived in Egypt in 1880. He chose a site in South Saqqara, a hill that had been mapped by the Prussian Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius in the prior decades, for his first archaeological dig. There, Maspero found the ruins of a large structure, which he concluded must be the pyramid of Pepi I of the Sixth Dynasty. During the excavations he was able to gain access to the subterranean rooms, and discovered that the walls of the structure were covered in hieroglyphic text. Maspero contacted the then 'director of the excavations' in Egypt, Auguste Mariette, to inform him of the discovery, though Mariette concluded that the structure must be a mastaba as no writing had previously been discovered in a pyramid. 
   Study of the decree was already under way when the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. Jean-François Champollion announced the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts in Paris in 1822; it took longer still before scholars were able to read Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently. Major advances in the decoding were recognition that the stone offered three versions of the same text (1799); that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names (1802); that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic (1814); and that phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words (1822–1824).
  
raw_presuppositions: Hieroglyphs on objects and artefacts were only written in the ancient Egyptian writing system.
raw_corrections: Hieroglyphs on objects and artefacts could be compared to known languages to decipher.