Hieroglyph

Hieroglyph was born at about 3,000 B.C. as the first alphabet, and became the
fundamentals of a phoneme alphabet. The alphabets supported Ancient Egyptian
civilization, but there are extremely few people who used this alphabet. At last, they
became the alphabets which are not to be removed from the premises. Because
of this, after it end the use of Hieroglyph, nobody who can read Hieroglyph by the
fourth century and Hieroglyph was forgot about the history. A chance which they
were deciphered occurred from an accident 1,400 years later.

The discovery of Rosetta Stone

　Napoleon Bonaparte, he was born in France, went on an expedition to the Egypt
in 1798. He was carrying 167 of investigating commission to investigate into the
Egyptian civilization right now. The investigating commission is composed of
mathematicians, chemists and the like. One year later the expedition, a monument
was discovered near the mouth of the Nile, Rasheed. This is the Rosetta Stone. It
was written the sentences as three kinds of alphabets from top. 後で分かるのです
が, three kinds of alphabets are Hieroglyph, Demotic and Ancient Greek alphabet.
Napoleon and his troupe copied the content of this monument and brought back to
France.

▲Napoleon

▲Rosetta Stone

Decipherment

To tell the truth, the existence of Hieroglyph was known until Rosetta Stone was
discovered; many people tried to decipher them, but met with failure. The discovery
of Rosetta Stone was expected to be materials for the decipherment of Hieroglyph.
The Greek alphabet written the first step from the bottom could be deciphered,
of course. And the study was proceeded, a hypothesis that the sentences of
the two alphabets from the top were written the same things was made. (This
hypothesis was right after all.) The people proceeded to decipher steadily in the
correspondence to this Greek language, but the decipherment ran into difficulties. It
had been thirty years while the decipherment was not be proceeded well.

The entrance on a genius, Champollion

Jean-Francois Champollion(1790~1832), he was born in France in 1790, was still
nine when Rosetta Stone was discovered. However, he had an extremely talented brain.
He acquired Latin in that time and the language more than thirteen countries until he
was seventeen.

▲Champollion

Champollion had an opportunity to be shown to Rosetta Stone by the
mathematician Fourier when he was eleven. He was interested in and said “I will certainly
read it when I grow” He started to decipher of Hieroglyph after that. He was tight, but
deciphered it at all after twenty years he saw it for the first time. Then he published a result
of the decipherment in 1882. In this way, the report of the decipherment of Hieroglyph
spread around the world. And Champollion continued on research activities since then,
open up the learning “Egyptology”, called “The father of Ancient Egyptology”. But, having being enthusiastic about his long-cherished research, he died at the youth age of forty-one.

The influence of the decipherment of Hieroglyph

The research of Ancient Egypt made great progress by the decipherment of Hieroglyph.