Editing Rosetta Stone (section)

===Demotic text===
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 (Egyptian)|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 alphabet|Coptic script]]. French Orientalist [[Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy|Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy]] had been discussing this work with Åkerblad when, in 1801, he received one of the early lithographic prints of the Rosetta Stone, 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 ("''[[Alexander the Great|Alexandros]]''", "''[[Alexandria|Alexandreia]]''", "''[[Ptolemy V Epiphanes|Ptolemaios]]''", "''[[Arsinoe III of Egypt|Arsinoe]]''", and Ptolemy's title "''Epiphanes''"),{{Cref2|C}} 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.{{Cref2|D}}<ref name="Budge133"/> They could not, however, identify the remaining characters in the Demotic text, which, as is now known, included [[ideogram|ideographic]] and other symbols alongside the phonetic ones.<ref>[[#Robinson09|Robinson (2009)]] pp.&nbsp;59–61</ref>

<gallery widths="200" heights="200" mode="packed">
File:Akerblad.jpg|alt=Illustration depicting two columns of Demotic text and their Greek equivalent, as devised by Johan David Åkerblad in 1802|[[Johan David Åkerblad]]'s table of Demotic phonetic characters and their [[Coptic alphabet|Coptic]] equivalents (1802)
File:DemoticScriptsRosettaStoneReplica.jpg|Replica of the Demotic texts
</gallery>

{{Anchor|The hieroglyphic text}}