The Deciphered Cartouche

Cracking the Phonetic Code of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Carved across a fractured slab of dark granodiorite measuring 112 centimeters high, 75 centimeters wide, and weighing 760 kilograms—pulled from a medieval wall by French military engineers under Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard while reinforcing Fort Julien near Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta on July 15, 1799—was a priestly tax decree issued at Memphis on March 27, 196 BCE on the first anniversary of the coronation of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. Because the Ptolemaic court spoke Macedonian Greek while native Egyptian priests conducted rituals in traditional scripts, the stela recorded the exact same decree in three parallel registers: fourteen surviving lines of sacred Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top, thirty-two lines of cursive Egyptian Demotic in the middle, and fifty-four complete lines of ancient Greek capitals at the bottom.

For scholars across Europe, the bottom Greek register was immediately readable, ending with the explicit instruction that the decree be carved in sacred characters, native characters, and Greek characters. Yet for twenty-two years after its discovery, Europe's finest classicists and orientalists stared at the Rosetta Stone and failed to read the Egyptian hieroglyphs above.

They were blocked by a fourteen-hundred-year scholarly consensus regarding what a hieroglyph was. Ever since the last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved at Philae in 394 CE, European scholarship rested on a fifth-century treatise titled Hieroglyphica, attributed to Horapollo. Horapollo asserted that Egyptian hieroglyphs were never a phonetic writing system representing spoken sounds; instead, every bird, scarab beetle, or eye was a pure symbolic ideogram—a mystical Neo-Platonic picture encoding an entire philosophical concept in a single sign. Expanded across thousands of pages in the 1650s by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, this ideographic orthodoxy held such authority that reading native Egyptian words phonetically was dismissed as philological ignorance.

Between 1814 and 1819, the British physicist Thomas Young made a partial advance. Reasoning that when Egyptian scribes had to carve the foreign name of a Greek ruler like Ptolemaios inside an oval royal ring (cartouche), they could not use mystical Egyptian symbols for a foreign sound, Young matched the Rosetta Stone cartouche against a bilingual obelisk from Philae bearing the name Kleopatra and identified several phonetic signs inside the royal ovals. There, however, Young stopped dead. Bound by Horapollo's orthodoxy, he concluded in his 1819 Encyclopædia Britannica supplement that phonetic spelling was a late Greco-Roman corruption restricted exclusively to foreign royal names inside cartouches, while the remaining ninety-nine percent of native Egyptian hieroglyphs were non-phonetic ideograms.

In Paris, French linguist Jean-François Champollion brought a decisive weapon to the problem: fluency in Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christian monasteries that represented the final surviving stage of ancient spoken Egyptian. On December 21, 1821, sitting at his desk with lithographic plates of the Rosetta Stone, Champollion performed a simple quantitative audit that nobody in twenty-two years had run. He counted the individual Greek words in the fifty-four complete lines at the bottom of the stone: there were 486 words. Next, he counted the individual hieroglyphic signs surviving in the broken fourteen lines at the top—less than half of the original hieroglyphic inscription. Even in that damaged upper fragment, there were 1,419 individual hieroglyphic signs.

The arithmetic demolished fourteen centuries of ideographic dogma. If every hieroglyph represented one complete word or idea, a broken fragment could not contain nearly three times as many signs as there were words in the entire Greek text. The glyphs had to represent phonetic consonants and syllables.

Cross-checking the overlapping glyphs in Ptolemaios ($P\text{-}T\text{-}O\text{-}L\text{-}M\text{-}Y\text{-}S$), Kleopatra ($K\text{-}L\text{-}E\text{-}O\text{-}P\text{-}A\text{-}T\text{-}R\text{-}A$), and Alexandros—where the square mat ($P$), recumbent lion ($L$), and knotted cord ($O$) appeared in their predicted slots—Champollion compiled a phonetic alphabet of over two dozen signs. On the morning of September 14, 1822, he received drawings copied by architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot from the rock-cut temple of Abu Simbel in Nubia, carved a millennium before Alexander the Great's Greek conquest. Examining a pre-Greek royal cartouche containing a solar disk, a three-pronged stalk, and two folded cloths ($S$), Champollion applied his Coptic vocabulary: the Coptic word for the Sun was Ra, and the three-pronged sign aligned on the Rosetta Stone with the Coptic word for giving birth, mise ($M\text{-}S$). Sounding out the signs together yielded Ra-mes-s-s—the pharaoh Rameses. A second ancient cartouche beginning with a sacred ibis (symbol of the god Thoth) followed by the same $M\text{-}S$ birth sign read Thoth-mes (Thutmose), proving that pharaonic writing from its earliest dynasties was a hybrid script uniting phonetic consonant signs with silent semantic classifier signs (determinatives). Champollion sprinted across the Rue Mazarine to his brother Jacques-Joseph's office at the Institut de France, threw his notes onto the desk announcing in French that he had solved the affair, and collapsed to the floor in a five-day exhaustion faint before presenting his Lettre à M. Dacier on September 27, 1822.