Editing Rosetta Stone (section)

===Hieroglyphic text===
[[File:Champollion table.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|alt=A page containing three columns of characters, the first column depicting characters in Greek and the second and third columns showing their equivalents in demotic and in hieroglyphs respectively|[[Jean-François Champollion|Champollion]]'s table of hieroglyphic phonetic characters with their demotic and Coptic equivalents (1822)]]

Silvestre de Sacy eventually gave up work on the stone, but he was to make another contribution. In 1811, prompted by discussions with a Chinese student about [[Chinese character|Chinese script]], Silvestre de Sacy considered a suggestion made by [[Jörgen Zoega|Georg Zoëga]] in 1797 that the foreign names in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions might be written phonetically; he also recalled that as early as 1761, [[Jean-Jacques Barthélemy]] had suggested that the characters enclosed in [[cartouche]]s in hieroglyphic inscriptions were proper names. Thus, when [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]], foreign secretary of the [[Royal Society|Royal Society of London]], wrote to him about the stone in 1814, Silvestre de Sacy suggested in reply that in attempting to read the hieroglyphic text, Young might look for cartouches that ought to contain Greek names and try to identify phonetic characters in them.<ref>[[#Robinson09|Robinson (2009)]] p.&nbsp;61</ref>

Young did so, with two results that together paved the way for the final decipherment. In the hieroglyphic text, he discovered the phonetic characters "{{Transliteration|egy|p t o l m e s}}" (in today's transliteration "{{Transliteration|egy|p t w l m y s}}") that were used to write the Greek name "{{Transliteration|grc|Ptolemaios}}". He also noticed that these characters resembled the equivalent ones in the demotic script, and went on to note as many as 80 similarities between the hieroglyphic and demotic texts on the stone, an important discovery because the two scripts were previously thought to be entirely different from one another. This led him to deduce correctly that the demotic script was only partly phonetic, also consisting of ideographic characters derived from hieroglyphs.{{Cref2|I}} Young's new insights were prominent in the long article "Egypt" that he contributed to the {{lang|la-GB|[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]}} in 1819.{{Cref2|J}} He could make no further progress, however.<ref>[[#Robinson09|Robinson (2009)]] pp.&nbsp;61–64</ref>

In 1814, Young first exchanged correspondence about the stone with [[Jean-François Champollion]], a teacher at [[Grenoble]] who had produced a scholarly work on ancient Egypt. Champollion saw copies of the brief hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions of the [[Philae obelisk]] in 1822, on which [[William John Bankes]] had tentatively noted the names "{{Transliteration|grc|Ptolemaios}}" and "{{Transliteration|grc|Kleopatra}}" in both languages.<ref>[[#Parkinson69|Parkinson et al. (1999)]] p.&nbsp;32</ref> From this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters {{Transliteration|egy|k l e o p a t r a}} (in today's transliteration {{Transliteration|egy|q l i҆ w p 3 d r 3.t}}).<ref name="Budge136">[[#Budge69|Budge (1913)]] pp.&nbsp;3–6</ref> On the basis of this and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters, completing his work on 14 September and announcing it publicly on 27 September in a lecture to the {{lang|fr|[[Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres|Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres]]}}.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Hr3wCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA97 |pages=98–99 |title=The Reality of the Unobservable: Observability, Unobservability and Their Impact on the Issue of Scientific Realism |author1=E. Agazzi |author2=M. Pauri |publisher=Springer Science & Business Media |year=2013|isbn=978-94-015-9391-5 }}</ref> On the same day he wrote the famous "{{lang|fr|[[Lettre à M. Dacier]]}}" to [[Bon-Joseph Dacier]], secretary of the Académie, detailing his discovery.{{Cref2|K}} In the postscript Champollion notes that similar phonetic characters seemed to occur in both Greek and Egyptian names, a hypothesis confirmed in 1823, when he identified the names of pharaohs [[Ramesses I|Ramesses]] and [[Thutmose I|Thutmose]] written in cartouches at [[Abu Simbel temples|Abu Simbel]]. These far older hieroglyphic inscriptions had been copied by Bankes and sent to Champollion by [[Jean-Nicolas Huyot]].{{Cref2|M}} From this point, the stories of the Rosetta Stone and the [[decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs]] diverge, as Champollion drew on many other texts to develop an Ancient Egyptian grammar and a hieroglyphic dictionary which were published after his death in 1832.<ref>[[#Dewachter90|Dewachter (1990)]] p.&nbsp;45</ref>