Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Demotic
vocabularies
of Akerblad
and de Sacy.
Kircher,
Jablonski,
de Guignes
and Tychsen.
Thomas
Young and
the Rosetta
Stone.
VI Introduction.
words, and added translations of them which are surprisingly
correct considering the period when they were compiled. And
both were able to read correctly the demotic equivalents of several
Greek royal names, e.g., Alexander, Ptolemy and Berenice. Their
failure to apply the method by which they achieved such success
to the hieroglyphic inscriptions is inexplicable. It has been
suggested that their scholarly minds revolted at the absurd views,
theories and statements about the Egyptian hieroglyphs made
by Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), Jablonski (1673-1757), J. de
Guignes (1721-1800), Tychsen (1734-1815) and others, and the
suggestion is probably correct. After the publication of his
famous " Letter " 1
to S. de Sacy, Akerblad seems to have dropped
his Egyptological studies. At all events, he published nothing
about them. De Sacy, though he did not consider that he had
wasted the time that he had spent on the demotic text on the
Rosetta Stone, refrained from further research in Egyptology,
and nothing of importance was effected in the decipherment of the
Egyptian hieroglyphs until Dr. Thomas Young (June I3th, 1773-
May loth, 1830) turned his attention to them.
YOUNG'S HIEROGLYPHIC ALPHABET AND VOCABULARY.
In 1814 Young began to study the inscriptions on the Rosetta
Stone, and, according to his own statement, succeeded in a few
months in translating both the demotic and the hieroglyphic
texts. His translations, together with notes and some remarks
on Akerblad's Demotic Alphabet, were printed in Archceologia for
1815, under the title " Remarks on Egyptian Papyri and on the
Inscription of Rosetta." With respect to the Egyptian Alphabet
"
he says, I had hoped to find an alphabet which would enable
... I
me to read the enchorial inscription. . . . But
had gradually been compelled to abandon this expectation, and
to admit the conviction that no such alphabet would ever be
discovered, because it had never been in existence." During the
next three or four years he made striking progress in the decipherment
of both demotic and hieroglyphic characters. The results
of his studies at this period were published in his article EGYPT,
which appeared in Part I of the fourth volume of the Encyclo-
pedia Britannica in 1819. It was accompanied by five plates,
containing inter alia a hieroglyphic vocabulary of 218 words, a
1
Lettre sur I'Inscription Egyptienne de Rosette, adressee au citoyen Silvestre
de Sacy, Paris (Imprimerie de la Republique Francaise) and Strasbourg, an X
(1802), 8vo. With a plate containing the Demotic Alphabet.