How did the ancient Egyptians decode hieroglyphics?

Answer 1

Apparently scientists found an ancient stone tablet containing the same text in three different languages, with Hieroglyphs being one, and using the understanding of the other languages they figured out Hieroglyphs. Can't recall the name of the tablet nor when it was discovered though.

Answer 2

Well, in 1799, when the Rosetta stone was found, it had three language written on it, the three language was: hieroglyphics, the later version of egyptian, and greek. Greek was still used and known, so a scholar translated hieroglyphics in the Greek and now egyptolgists can read the symbols that were unknown before 1799. For more infos, search Google

Answer 3

They didn't "decode" them; they simply read them, as you do with these words now.


Another answer:


The Ancient Egyptians did not need to decode Hieroglyphics. They used Hieroglyphics as their written language. Then The Persians, The Greeks, The Romans, and The Arabs conquered Egypt. All of them used a different language. The people of Egypt forgot about Hieroglyphics and used the language of their latest conquerors. We have to decode Hieroglyphics. We decoded it from the Rosetta Stone which had the same information written in three different languages, one of which was Hieroglyphics. We decoded the Mayan language from a dictionary found in an old Spanish Monastery. No one has found a way to decode the ancient language of the Indus Valley.

Answer 4

The origins of hieroglyphic writing date back to long before the unification of Egypt under the first pharaohs [the Predynastic period] The Egyptians themselves did not record the story of how their writing developed and there were no foreign observers to record that story in other languages.

All we can say is that the earliest known hieroglyphs are already a fully-developed writing system, meaning that even earlier texts were written on some perishable material that has not survived.

It seems that in order to write a word, the picture of something with the same consonant sounds was used - hieroglyphs did not write any vowels, making this much easier to do. Suppose, for example, that we wanted to do this in English. We want to write down the verb "be" [with the consonant b], but finding a picture of that would be difficult - luckily English has a word "bee" that can easily be depicted graphically, with the same single consonant. The difference in vowels does not matter, since only the consonant is important. To write "belief" [with the consonants blf] we would use pictures of a bee and a leaf [with exactly the same consonants: blf].

This form of writing is called rebus [Latin for "by things"], representing sounds by picturing objects: people, animals, furniture, insects, flowers and so on.

Ancient Egyptian writing probably started in exactly this way using the ancient Egyptian language and it quickly became much more complex, with a mixture of different types of sign, not just phonemes [sound-signs].

Answer 5

Jean Champollion used his knowledge of Greek to help decipher hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone which had 3 languages on it. Demonic, Greek and Hieroglyphics.

Answer 6

The archaeologist found the Rosetta Stone which helped them understand hieroglyphics.

Answer 7

by words carved in the caves. they understand the sound of each symbol and then understand the world,