In 1798, Napoleon led an expedition to Egypt. Not only did this army have the terrible power to defeat the Mamluk army in one fell swoop at the Battle of the Pyramids, but it also had a team of 167 experts and scholars who were responsible for a detailed investigation of Egypt'Xi s geography, biology, folk customs, and especially ancient architecture.
This particular army really brought an unexpected gain to Napoleon I. In 1799, Broshard, a young officer in Napoleon's army, found a stone engraved with hieroglyphs near the Roseda Fort at the mouth of the Nile, a tabletop-sized black basalt tablet with three scripts, the first in Egyptian hieroglyphs with 11 lines, the second in Egyptian popular script with 32 lines, and the third in Greek. In 1802, King George III received this stele from the French and gave it to the British Museum, which is the most famous Roserda Stone in archaeological history: how can it be read? It seems that the only way to start is in Greek.
At that time, Egyptian hieroglyphs had become dead. Around 50 BC, the Romans began to invade Egypt, and it was not until 30 BC that Egypt was finally conquered and annexed by Rome. The Romans were hostile and indifferent to the culture of the occupied country, rather than protecting it. After the Romans, the Armenians and the Turks occupied Egypt. Due to worship and faith, in addition to the pyramids, temples and other magnificent ground buildings have been preserved, the history and culture of ancient Egypt have gradually been forgotten, and by the 18th century, Egyptian hieroglyphs have completely become dead and no one can read them at that time. The Rosetta Stone seems to be the key to unlocking the lock. Because the Greek inscriptions on the stele are recognizable.
Champollion was a French Egyptologist and linguist who was brilliant and active from an early age, and by the age of 16 he had mastered Latin, Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Dilledea, Coptic, Persian, and more. Rich in genius when it comes to languages. At the age of 19 he became a member of the Academic Council of the University of Grenoble. His interest in Egypt came from the influence of his older brother, who began studying ancient Egyptian literature at an early age. Later, he obtained a copy of the Rosetta Stone, and he devoted himself to research. His initial task was to interpret the hieroglyphic texts of the king's and queen's names, "Ptolemy" and "Cleopatra", which had been partially identified by the Greek text.
Step 1: Identify the phonetic symbols of all the hieroglyphs in it, by comparing them with other names of kings surrounded by oval outlines, and by comparing them with phonetic symbols of similar words in known Coptic texts, the rest of the text is also easily solved, and the results are very surprising: it turns out that Egyptian scripts not only contain ideographic components, but also their pronunciation, for example, the image of a house with a P sound, the image of a hand with a D sound, the image of an owl with an M sound, the chicken image with a W sound, the water wave image table, tone and so on. After the obvious success of this work, Champollion went abroad twice. In 1826 he visited the collection of Egyptian antiquities at the Italian Museum, and in 1828-1829 he asked for the first time about Egyptian ancient architecture
1. A systematic study of pictographic inscriptions: Champollion Hill was appointed curator of the Louvre Collection of Egyptian Antiquities in 1826 for his outstanding contribution to the field of Egyptology, and in 1831 he was awarded the position of Professor of Egyptian History and Egyptian Astrology by the French Academy. However, due to overwork, he unfortunately died young a year later. In the efforts of the successors, today people have fully mastered the ancient Egyptian language. As a result, people can confirm the approximate time of the rise and fall of each dynasty and the reign of each pharaoh in Egyptian history, understand the living Xi and religious beliefs of the Egyptians at that time, and appreciate their poetry and beautiful writing
Although the hieroglyphs were deciphered, another mystery ensued. People cannot help but ask: The development of writing generally goes through several stages, such as pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic, so why did Egyptian hieroglyphs appear in such a faceted form as alphabetic writing very early? How did their writing reach such a highly developed level with both ideographic and pronunciation? Who created these writings? Is there still a prehistoric Egypt that is not known to us so far?