Decipherment of Rosetta stone

The decipherment and Rosetta stone

This language ruled the hearts and minds of several generations of ancient Egyptians and witnessed several turmoil, the papyrus usage and cursive writing form, known as Hieratic language came in vogue parallel to Hieroglyphic form of writing and slowly, both these slipped into oblivion and got replaced by a language called demotic. The demotic language probably gave rise to Coptic with the Greek alphabets and rest is history. The above sequence of languages is based on the Egyptologists assumptions that the languages are constant and continuous and the succeeding languages are always born from the languages of previous generations. They do not take into account that Egypt was a precious region which was bone of contention between several rival civilizations and wars were fought to control it and since the advent of Iron age, it was mostly ruled by the foreigners be it the Libyans, the Nubians, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans. Did not all these people change the language of Egypt? If not, how come the modern language of Egypt is Arabic and almost no trace of Coptic language is left? Do the Egyptologists believe that in case the modern Egyptians wrote Arabic with Greek alphabets, Arabic would have been called a derived language from Greek or Coptic?

Thus their basic assumption that there was absolute continuity of languages from ancient Egypt to modern Egypt is full of flaws when we see clearly that during the Ptolemic times, Greek rose to prominence and replaced the language of Egypt.

Yes, I do agree that the influence of preceding language on the succeeding cannot be done away fully despite the ruling elite wanted to do so and hence probably, there could be reminiscences of ancient Egyptian language visible in the Coptic language.

However, there is danger in discarding the original language and working with a language wherein a few such reminiscences were seen to read the Hieroglyphic language.

The decipherment of ancient Hieroglyphic language got a major break- through when one granite stele having inscriptions in three languages, Greek, demotic and hieroglyphs was re-discovered by the French soldiers in Port city of Rosetta( modern day Port Rashid). This was a stele erected on the coronation of Ptloemy V dated around 196 B.C and since it contained trilingual texts, it proved to be a key to knowing at least the alphabets of the ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

The actual decipherment

Champollian assumed that the names written in Cartouche were of Cleopatra and Ptolemy and when he compared this with the names written in Greek, he understood that number 1 is pa, number 2 is ta, number 3 is wa, number 4 is la number 5 is ma, number 6 is ya or I  and number 7 is sa and all combined would give the name Ptolmis.

No. 1, PTOLEMY.

No. 2, CLEOPATRA.

Since the second name is Cleopatra, number 1 is ka, number 2,is la, number 3 is I number 4 is wa, number 5 is pa, number 6 is A, number 7 is ta, number 8 is ra number 9 is A, number 10 is ta and number 11 is ra and combined gives the name Kleopatra rati.

However, it was found that lion symbol, number 4 in the first one and number 2 in the second one was actually sound ra earlier but bcos of the phonetic changes, in later times it was used to sound la as well.

Similarly, the hand symbol number 7 in the second one was actually sounding da but was being used here to sound ta.

Now, Champollian had the alphabets of the ancient Hieroglyphic language and his attention was drawn to the sign F31 accompanied with sign S29, which according to him means birth when he compared it with the Greek language. Now, the sign F31 was sounding ‘ms’ as per him and it was three foxes skins tied together and S29 was sounding  ‘s’, which the Egyptologists identified as folded cloth.

Champollian probably was literate in Coptic language and had little or no knowledge of any other ancient languages of the East which could be one of the probable contenders for the Hieroglyphic language. He jumped to the conclusion that since mece is a Coptic word meaning birth and these two signs one sound ms and other sounding s are present, Coptic is the ultimate successor of the ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic language. This assumption of Champollian led to troubles for the successive Egyptologists as, this closed their minds and they did not look beyond Coptic. This did more harm and injustice to the ancient Egyptian language than doing any favor.

Let me prove where Champollian was wrong in his assumptions:

Let’s analyze, the sign F31 

   Three fox skins joined together Phono. ms. In msi “give birth.”

which Egyptologists call three fox skins tied at the top ( I do not understand, how the Egyptologists are able to identify precisely even the skin type?): Can Coptic give answer what is the relation between the skin and the sound ms, well I hope no answer. The word for this is mAs= flesh/meat.

Now the second question arises, when the sign F31 was already giving the sound of ms which is enough for Champollian to understand that it was sounding ms meaning ‘mece’ and hence meaning birth, what was the need for the ancient Egyptians to write a second sign S29,  giving a further sound of ‘s’?

The answer is,‘s’ is actually with the vowel, sU=producing/begetting/bringing forth/procreating /parturition/mother/child bearing/father etc.

Thus, the two signs combined together, gave the meaning, bringing forth in flesh or born in flesh.

Now, these two words, mAs and sU, don’t they destroy the basic assumption of Champollian and all his followers, who subsequently built an artificial, complicated language which even the ancient Egyptians would not be able to read even if we provide them with the manuals prepared by these Egyptologists.

Now the Egyptologists claim that the ancient Egyptians never used the vowels and hence they artificially use the vowels ‘e’ to read the words. This makes the things even more complicated and I challenge the Egyptologists, if they can pronounce even one sentence transliterated by them. Do they mean that the ancient Egyptians who were at the top of the world in terms of their technology were dumb people? They never pronounced their words? Were their words nonsense and meanings idiotic? Were they idiotic when they could not use the vowels to make words?