How did french scholar jean Champollion's use the Rosetta stone to decipher the meaning of hieroglyphs?

Answer 1

Jean Francois Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone by creating an alphabet based on the Greek and the hieroglyphs he recognized. He was able to decipher Ptolemy's name quickly because he had recently seen it on a obelisk. Once he had the names deciphered he was able to create an alphabet and decipher the rest.

Answer 2

he started by finding common words within the three languages (ex. ptolemy) with that, he tried to find the characters that made up the words, while comparing them to the characters found in the other words he deciphered. As he went on, it got a lot easier to find out the meaning of the new characters, although I think he only managed to decipher about 6 in his life time.

Answer 3

Champollion could read both Greek and coptic.

He was able to figure out what the seven demotic signs in coptic were. By looking at how these signs were used in coptic he was able to work out what they stood for. Then he began tracing these demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs.

By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he could make educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs stood for.

Answer 4

The two major obstacles for anyone attempting decipherment are:

• what language is being written?

• is the writing system an alphabet, a syllabary, a rebus or a combination of all of these?

Without knowing what language is represented it is impossible to try to allocate meanings to each letter or symbol; having established the language, it is relatively simple to calculate the number of different signs and decide what kind of writing system is involved.

Champollion was fortunate in being a language scholar who had studied earlier attempts at decipherment and was fluent in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chaldean and Syriac; he also studied Coptic - the almost extinct language spoken by non-Moslem Egyptians (the very last version of the ancient Egyptian language).

So Champollion understood how languages work, how they behave and how words impact on other words; he also had a huge clue to the language of the hieroglyphs because of his knowledge of Coptic. He was helped considerably by the earlier work of the Englishman John Young, who had already made considerable progress. But it was Champollion who correctly understood that hieroglyphs were composed of many different types of signs, some being alternative forms of others.

Answer 5

The Rosetta stone had texts in three languages, two of which could already be read and translated. Champollion found that they were the same texts and figured that the hieroglyph text probably also had the same content. His first breakthrough was rightly guessing that the groups of hieroglyphs that were circled, contained the names of royal persons also mentioned in the other texts.

Answer 6

champollion had concluded that hierogolyphics had been originally been pictographs but, they stood for sounds in the later times.

Answer 7

Yes, the Rosetta stone helped to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.