tour 7 of 22
Enlightenment: Ancient Scripts
Hieroglyphs
Hieroglyphs were the form of writing used by
the ancient Egyptians. They were used mainly on temples and
official monuments, but handwritten forms of the script also
existed for everyday use. They were no longer used after about the
fourth century AD, however, and they acquired an almost magical
significance.
By the
eighteenth century, scholars throughout Europe were attempting to
decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, which they believed could help them
rediscover the mystical wisdom of ancient Egyptian priests. Their
fascination sprang from the fact that each sign is a picture. This
made people think that hieroglyphs were symbols recording ideas
rather than the sounds of a spoken
language.
The key to
deciphering hieroglyphics was an inscribed stone discovered at
Rosetta by the French army in 1799. The stone was handed over to
the English after they defeated Napoleon's army in 1801.
The work of scholars from both countries led to the decipherment of
hieroglyphs in 1824. They discovered that hieroglyphs did in fact
record the sounds of the Egyptian language. As a result, the
Rosetta Stone has become an icon of all decipherments and of
attempts to access the ancient past in its own
terms.