tour 10 of 22
Enlightenment: Ancient Scripts
A letter from Thomas Young about hieroglyphs
The English polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829)
had been trying to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs since the
French army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799. He wrote this
letter to the father of William John Bankes (1786-1855), the
English traveller and
antiquary,
in 1818. Bankes was travelling in Egypt at that time and Young was
hoping that he would be 'able to assist in promoting the
investigation of the hieroglyphical antiquities of that singular
country'.
In his
letter, Young expresses the hope that lost fragments of the Rosetta
Stone might be discovered (which never happened), and that a
duplicate of the Stone's text might be recovered in Cairo.
He also encourages Bankes to concentrate on copying the most
relevant inscriptions for decipherment - those giving the names of
kings and gods - and indicates where these are to be found in
relation to carved
reliefs.
At the bottom of
the letter Young copied out the hieroglyphic words he had
deciphered by this date. The meanings he gives are mostly correct,
but, unlike Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), he failed to
understand the way in which the script worked.