How We Decoded The Hieroglyphs Of Ancient Egypt
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- Опубликовано: 26 май 2022
- 'How We Decoded The Hieroglyphs Of Ancient Egypt'
In this clip from the History Hit documentary 'The Story of Egyptology', Dr Chris Naunton explores how 18th century scholars worked frantically to decode the secrets of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
Watch the full episode now on History Hit TV: access.historyhit.com/what-s-...
Egyptologist Dr Chris Naunton explores the story of how Ancient Egypt was rediscovered, and how its incredible sites and treasures were gradually decoded. Starting with the earliest travellers who ventured inside the pyramids, Chris traces how this curiosity exploded into Egyptomania in the 18th and 19th centuries. Beginning with the French invasion under Napoleon, we discover how Egypt was explored, plundered and eventually deciphered as increasingly scientific approaches were taken. Highlights include the audacious treasure hunting by Belzoni, the painstaking decoding of hieroglyphs and Flinders Petrie's introduction of modern methodology - all leading to Howard Carter's opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun.
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Join us on the History Hit RUclips channel TONIGHT at 7PM for a live Q&A session with Egyptologist Dr Chris Naunton. Here's the link: ruclips.net/video/GtrKUvmBBAo/видео.html
He'll be talking about his first full-length documentary on History Hit TV, 'The Story of Egyptology'. There'll also be a live watch-along of the episode and the chance to put your questions to the producers, Mark Edger and Milo Cumpstey. 😀
can you do a piece on the largest ancient dig that i found, you can see the location, it is just 2 clicks away thanks
What if we throw heriogliphic script stone plates in between forbidden tribes like Andman Nicobar, Amazon and other African isolated tribes. Maybe someday we come to know that any tribe is reading that heriogliphic Egyptian language.
@@FARMAN68 how about someone else decode this ancient story board ruclips.net/video/8Vg65bceDM4/видео.html
When are you gonna return the stuff you stole?
Probably one of the most well presented docos i have seen in recent years. This fellow has a knack for explaning things carefully and isn't over the top with expressions or tv persona. Sorta reminds me of the great bbc docos of old, where the narrator actually narrates and informs rather than belittles or is comical about the content. Thankyou very much.
You may be interested in this live event this evening: ruclips.net/video/GtrKUvmBBAo/видео.html
Im always down for a good docky wocky!
Amazing how almost no funding or effort ha been put into decoding Meroitic script (Nubian pictograms)
Every time I watch something like this it baffles me how ridiculously intelligent some individuals have been throughout history.
This should be shown to anyone who says history is boring. Even the history of exploring history can be fascinating.
I've been fascinated by history for as long as I can remember but the history they chose to teach us in grades 9 & 10 (if pupils chose history as one of their optional subjects)
was incredibly dull stuff. It was all about agricultural and industrial progress, then political reform. Now I accept that social history has done more for the common folk than kings, knights, castles and battles ever did - but when you're 14 years old reading about horse drawn seed drills and the intricacies of textile manufacture is a form of purgatory.
Egyptologist after deciphering hieroglyphs: "It's a cookbook! It's a cookbook!" 😄
to serve man lol
"The work done by Young & Champollion was truly magnificent". I'm not trying to restart the rivalry, but one guy's main contributions were making some random guesses and actively preventing his rival from getting his hands on useful sources; while the other guy's cracked the supposedly undecipherable code. One work seems a tad more magnificent than the other.
Exactly the Englishman made the breakthrough
@Real Aiglon That Englishman accomplished more by the age of 15 than you’ve done in you’re entire life.
@Real Aiglon yes it’s like the enigma deciphering, the merite belongs to the Poles
:) In the 9th century, an alchemist by the name of Abu Bakr ibn Wahshiyya managed to decipher about half of all Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. Considering the fact that there are a total of about 700-800 symbols to be cracked, this was an achievement that deserves recognition. Ibn Wahshiyya’s contribution was first brought to light in 2004 by the London-based Egyptologist Dr. Okasha El Daly, a professor at UCL’s Institute of Archeology. El Daly did extensive research on the study of ancient Egypt in medieval Arab-Islamic writing and convincingly argued that not only did Muslims express a deep interest in the study of ancient civilizations, but that they could also correctly decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic script. He hacked other cryptic alphabets as well - 93 of them, in fact, including alphabets used by the ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Semitic, Hellenistic, and Hindu civilizations. He published his findings in a text titled Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham, in which he gave a list of hieroglyphic symbols, their meaning (either as sounds or words) and their Arabic equivalent. El Daly compared Ibn Wahshiyya’s conclusions on hieroglyphics with Egyptologists’ modern-day understanding of them and found them to be accurate. El Daly emphasized that, because of their prejudices about Islam, Western scholars have been unfair to classical Muslim Egyptologists. “Western culture misinterprets Islam because we [in the West] think teaching [of civilizations] before the Qur’an is shunned, which isn’t the case,” he said. “They valued history and assumed Egypt was a land of science and wisdom and as such they wanted to learn their language to have access to such vast knowledge.”
@@abuamanah9176 Then why do they try to destroy all the artifacts?
All of this hinges on this one random stone that happened to survive relatively intact for close to two millennia. That, to me, is insane.
We might have been able to decipher hieroglyphics without the stone eventually but it would have taken longer and no one would have ever been 100% sure that they were actually correct as they wouldn't have had a direct translation to compare their findings to.
I never comment on RUclips videos but did want to express how well put together and presented this is. Subscribed!
This was really exciting. I loved it!
It absolutely blew my mind to learn that this was the same Young who devised the original double slit experiment. What an absolute genius.
Was he tha same young?
@@shadilnazir2001Yep. The physicist and polymath Thomas Young.
I have always been fascinated by Ancient Egypt. Thousands of years of history all crammed into one country.
Amazing narrative and well research short documentary.
I believe Carl Sagan's Cosmos mentioned this story with an added detail about Champollion's childhood with the Mathematician Joseph Fourier. Fourier was on the expedition that discovered the Rosetta Stone, and Sagan explained that an 11 year old Champollion, gifted with languages, was invited to Fourier's office and was so enthralled by the undecipherable text that he declared he'd be the one decipher it. But is it true? How much did Fourier interact with Champollion? What Cosmos episode was that?
Was fourier a soldier in napoleon's army?
Very interesting! Even with the stone, it's amazing that they cracked it. 👍🏻 New subscriber!
I’ve been waiting for this for a v long time., so thank you! 🙏
First time in my long life to find out heiroglyphics were substantially phonetic! That's a major revelation
Yeh I was blown away by that, too!
They are, what is the term in English, portmanteau words? Rebus words? I don't remember the term. When you use a picture of something to indicate the sound of the word that designates that something, or in this case the consonants of that word. Like using a picture of a dog to indicate the consonants "dg"
wow that was great. Nice work.
Thanks for making this so understandable!
Thank you. Interesting subject!
Ive always wondered about this!!! TY!
This video gave exactly what I was looking for when I searched for this topic.
Excellent ..well done
Great, more please 🙏
Absolutely fascinating
Please post some more videos from this series! :D
Fascinating
Very nicely explained.
Imagine having to chisel a picture of a bird every time you want an 'a'
Always wondered about this!
Superb thank you
Very interesting 👍🏼
This is something that I really enjoy.
Fantastic video dude you guys really deserve more subs
Thanks mate!
Brilliant thanks
Amazing.
Very good video, thanks
Glad you liked it!
I admire such people! I could watch these videos till the end of the time.
A great story, told well. Maybe you could do a video talking more about the Rosetta stone and the language lessons it contained?
.....DONT BE FOOLED WE THE WEST (& very soon the rest of the WORLD) ARE IN A WAR ECONOMY...WORLD WAR 3, began 2 mths ago....we'll see an Economic Depression in 9 mths time & be told that we have to take the pain to ensure VICTORY & have them stating we need to tighten our belts & send our YOUNG off to a RIGHTEOUS WAR inorder to fight a "BOOGEY-MAN" u know the same shit they did with WW2....once the ELITES strip the planet of any potential to make a profit, they turn to next easiest distraction a WORLD WAR (inorder to keep PROFITING), this also keeps the slaves from coming for them & their children (who are most likely vacationing on Daddy's Super Yacht, somewhere in the Mediterranean, snorting cocaine off a stripper's cleavage)...its bcz they have raped the world financial system (as they always do) & the only way to cover up all their crimes is to distract us (the slaves) with a WORLD WAR (where they keep profiting even more handsomely) they did the same in WW2, we are just a year or two ahead of 1937, if you know your economic history you will know that after the crash of 1929 & its arduous recovery by 1934/35, the world fell into another deep recession in 1937 & the only way out was to stir up Germany & Japan inorder to stoke a WORLD WAR, the ELITES were petrified that the slaves would come for them, same shit today only the (prepared) enemy this time is Russia & China.. so do the "right thing" send your grandchildren, your fathers, your husbands, your brothers, your sisters, your daughters off to war, so the ELITES children can continue partying up on St Barts & the poor are sent off to war to kill each other......STOP BEING SUCKERS !!!!.....
rosetta stone is not a complete piece but you can find Canopus Decree with nice Hieroglyphs and Greek
I visited the British Museum and stood in front of the Rosetta Stone all by myself for over an hour without a single other person taking the time to even peruse it so I got a good long uninterrupted look at it
And I bet after the hour you understood exactly as much as you did before
Awesome I’ve always wondered how they read those and other ancient writings
I loved the video
Thank you.
excellent
For me, even more fascinating and wonderful than Egyptian culture/history is the fact that Europeans, since the Renaissance, have this incredible curiosity, the fascination with new things and the drive to find out how things work.
Egypt not in Europe. Egyt in Africa continent
Nice video. It would be cool to see you do one about how the Gardener sign list came about.
Yes an immediate follow and thumbs up but I’m also very interested in the two guys at the end in armour ;)
Awesome💛💙
Best video on Egyptian language
thanks
fantastic.....wish it was longer heheheeh
I get the impression there’s more to this video. As in it feels like it’s part of a longer documentary. One I’d like to see. Going through the actual language and the text itself is very interesting.
You're right! You may be interested in this live event this evening: ruclips.net/video/GtrKUvmBBAo/видео.html
Wow! Ain't that fascinating
I also do want to mention the Tanis Stone which was discovered by Leo Simon Reinisch in 1866, he later became the rector of the University of Vienna. With the Tanis stele's help a much preciser translation of hieroglyphs were possible.
Am I correct in assuming that your shared surname is more than coincidence?
Fascinating. Thanks to champeleon
Je tiens l'affaire.
The bench by the river Thames in London i use it all the time i love the place 👍
Ive been to The British Museum and looked at the Rosetta stone. Its a fascinating thing.
What fun that would have been cracking into the code. The rush, the feeling
I want that desk lamp
Overstating Young's input a little. He had a team working under him, while Champollion was practically solo for the majority of his research.
What they did to him on his return from Egypt is a crime for the ages.
It occurs to me watching this video, that without the obsession with ancient Egypt and the break through of translation, people would proably still only see archaeology as treasure hunting and ignore a lot of important discoveries because they weren't pretty jewels or big monuments
.
That was a great explanation. I’ve always wondered how the Rosetta Stone helped crack the code for hieroglyphics.
Thank you I have always wondered how it broke down I have a thing for languages ever since I was a child
Imagine "dying" some millenias ago while your civilization is burning and dying itself, then being somehow brought back to life over 2000 years later and finding out that a handful of people managed to somehow learn your language and studied your civilization to the point of intimately knowing the greatest leaders of your time and your culture
Our science is slowly but steadily moving towards playing gods and its awesome
Hahahah XD
Playing god's ? Our civilization couldn't even handle a flu called covid. Don't overestimate these little achievements
Heretic
"Millenia" is already plural.
@@jamesmcinnis208 "James" is very generic.
Hello very great video. Is this based solely on whether or not the greek texts translates directly to the demotic and hieroglyphic?
Fainted he was so happy/excited/shocked. Someday I hope to be that happy.
I've been asking for 1000 years how they figured out the ancient egyptian LANGUAGE.
The only answer I find is always to a different question: how we deciphered hieroglyphs.
There's a difference between knowing how to PRONOUNCE what is written and understanding the meanings of those sounds.
amazing! I worked with a lady who could read Cuneiform.....impressive!
In days of old, someone was always announced with a list of thier titles, eg: overseer of the canals, visier of the third temple, slayer of the Mongols,... With Egyptian heiroglyphs, I'm sure the pyramid, ankh, djed symbols represent something extra alphabet, like we would use a PhD these days.
So a standard king's cartouche would be surrounded by ideas such as: builder of pyramid, builder of statues, master of agriculture, keeper of the knowledge of the ankh and djed.
Indeed. Specifically, Pharaohs had five names, all of them with the corresponding titles. They initially had less, the others developed through time. That is, after a Pharaoh added a certain name, the ones following him couldn't be less, now, could they? So they kept the tradition. They used three names that defined them in relation to the gods, then the throne name, that was closer to what later kings would use as a title (think Ruler of this and lord of that and protector of the other), and finally their proper name.
KFC in Chinese is phonetic "gun duh gee" which sounds similar to Kentucky. This is not just phonetic however as the word "gee" means chicken. Chinese writing "han zuh" sometimes uses a pictograph (often quite morphed over time) which contains meaning, and a phonetic component which indicates pronunciation.
It's cool that Ptolemy kinda helped crack Hyroglyphica.
Where is Part 2? It's cut off. Cheers.
interesting. similarly old turkic script was decoded by the chinese text (translation). kultegin inscription was discovered in 1889 by yardintsev and decoded by thomsen and radloff only 4 years later.
and the first word discovered was "köktengri" meaning sky god in old turkic.
Wow
Omg genius and what luck of finding that stone.
Im kinda obsessed with the concept of a universal language so I clicked. Thanks. U all made a great video. I think I find universal language BTW. Science is merely an agreement between 2 people articulating language.
I would like to have heard in some detail what the hieroglyphs say in the end. Anything interesting revealed by the ancient text then?
03:00 Ancient Greek could be read ANYTIME 😊
I recently bought a unique five panel bracelet with a gold and copperish tone looks alittle off to me but it has some weird maker stamps I haven’t been able to decode where shall I look for advice?
Have you taken into consider Wilson and Blackett's work?
We did it guys.
at the start of the story, how did young know he had the "tolomay cartoosh" (big apologies for the spelling) it seems like a guess that worked?
this is great though thankyou.. could feel myself getting excited along with the progression of the story.
He probably did a lot of research.. and he's an expert so he should make more accurate guesses
I’m Surprised More Rosetta Stones weren’t Found. There was 1 at Every major port down the Nile.
Nice of you to gloss over the fact that the reason the British obtained the Rosetta Stone was that it was given to them by General Jacques-François Menou in exchange for not slaughtering the remaining French troops after the Siege of Alexandria in 1801.
How’s that have anything to do with how we decoded Egyptian hieroglyphs? I guess you sound kinda smart until you realize you can just google this fact that had nothing to do with the video and that generally sieges ended in people taking something from the other people which makes your comment…… useless!
ive never seen a translation of a tablet or text from any tablet in text is there a place to see that ?
How about translations of obelisques: their purpose and attribution
What a brilliant subject! I've always been drawn to ancient Egypt as a young girl and as far back as I can remember. I've had such a curiosity as to how Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered and I even bought a book years ago - just stumbled on it... a coincidence... 🤔 I don't think so. Archeology is my passion, especially Egyptology. I'm Greek and the quest to discover Alexander the Great and Cleopatra is a burning flame... Both were from Macedonia and both disappeared in Egypt...
Thanks so much Dr Norton 🤗
"In the 9th century, an alchemist by the name of Abu Bakr ibn Wahshiyya managed to decipher about half of all Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. Considering the fact that there are a total of about 700-800 symbols to be cracked, this was an achievement that deserves recognition. Ibn Wahshiyya’s contribution was first brought to light in 2004 by the London-based Egyptologist Dr. Okasha El Daly, a professor at UCL’s Institute of Archeology. El Daly did extensive research on the study of ancient Egypt in medieval Arab-Islamic writing and convincingly argued that not only did Muslims express a deep interest in the study of ancient civilizations, but that they could also correctly decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic script. He hacked other cryptic alphabets as well - 93 of them, in fact, including alphabets used by the ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Semitic, Hellenistic, and Hindu civilizations. He published his findings in a text titled Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham, in which he gave a list of hieroglyphic symbols, their meaning (either as sounds or words) and their Arabic equivalent. El Daly compared Ibn Wahshiyya’s conclusions on hieroglyphics with Egyptologists’ modern-day understanding of them and found them to be accurate. El Daly emphasized that, because of their prejudices about Islam, Western scholars have been unfair to classical Muslim Egyptologists. “Western culture misinterprets Islam because we [in the West] think teaching [of civilizations] before the Qur’an is shunned, which isn’t the case,” he said. “They valued history and assumed Egypt was a land of science and wisdom and as such they wanted to learn their language to have access to such vast knowledge.”
I love the quiet disdain and begrudging respect French and British people have for each other. It will never not be amusing
One of the many beautiful African writing systems!!❤
No doubt perfect channel in information congratulation
Remember when I was little ,my teachers teaching me about this and I remember i could write some words of it , i wished it was a subject at the time , but sadly it was not and my teaching of it was gone but I do remember winning a writing competition at school doing it.and school trip to the British museum to see the most famous one.
The Verdict of Champollion, humanity’s greatest polyglot, on the Coptic Language:
Jean-François Champollion (1790 - 1832) deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822, and made it possible for modern Egyptology to emerge. He perhaps would not have been able to do that at all had he not studied Coptic first. There is one man, who is still largely enigmatic, who helped him to learn Coptic - Yuhanna Chiftichi, a Coptic priest who worked with the French during the French Campaign in Egypt (1798 - 1801), and left with the French, with many other Copts, to France when the French withdrew.[1] In France, he became priest at the church of Saint-Roch on Rue Saint-Honoré, in Paris. There, he assisted the Egyptian Commission in producing Description de l’Ėgypte; but, perhaps, his lasting service to civilisation was his assistance he gave to Champollion, who befriended him, to learn Coptic.
Champollion knew many European and Oriental languages, at least sixteen in total, including Latin, Greek, French, English, German, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean (Aramaic), Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese. When he became fluent in Coptic, he wrote in 1809:
I have thrown myself into Coptic, I want to know Egyptian as well as I know French, because my great work on the Egyptian papyrus [hieroglyphics] will be based on this language. . . . My Coptic is moving along, and I find in it the greatest joy, because you have to think: to speak the language of my dear Amenhotep, Seth, Ramses, Thuthmos, is no small thing. . . . As for Coptic, I do nothing else. I dream in Coptic. I do nothing but that, I dream only in Coptic, in Egyptian. . . . I am so Coptic, that for fun, I translate into Coptic everything that comes into my head. I speak Coptic all alone to myself (since no one else can understand me). This is the real way for me to put my pure Egyptian into my head. . . . In my view, Coptic is the most perfect, most rational language known.[2]
“Coptic is the most perfect and the most rational language known.”
This is the verdict of Champollion on the Coptic language. Those who know Coptic would tend to agree with him. And the Copts must know this, and be sure of the many beauties of their language.
________________
[1] For more on Yuhanna Chiftichi, see: Chiftichi, Yuhanna (CE:519a-520b) by Anouar Louca in Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz Suryal Atiya (New York, Macmillan, 1991).
[2] Muriel Mirak Weissbach, Jean François Champollion And the True Story of Egypt in 21st Century Science & Technology magazine, Winter 1999-2000, 12 (4), 26-39, p. 32. See also, Andrew Robinson, Cracking the Egyptian Code, The Revolutionary Life of Jean-Francois Champollion (London, Thames & Hudson, 2012), p. 61.
Very interesting Dr
:) In the 9th century, an alchemist by the name of Abu Bakr ibn Wahshiyya managed to decipher about half of all Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. Considering the fact that there are a total of about 700-800 symbols to be cracked, this was an achievement that deserves recognition. Ibn Wahshiyya’s contribution was first brought to light in 2004 by the London-based Egyptologist Dr. Okasha El Daly, a professor at UCL’s Institute of Archeology. El Daly did extensive research on the study of ancient Egypt in medieval Arab-Islamic writing and convincingly argued that not only did Muslims express a deep interest in the study of ancient civilizations, but that they could also correctly decipher Egyptian hieroglyphic script. He hacked other cryptic alphabets as well - 93 of them, in fact, including alphabets used by the ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Semitic, Hellenistic, and Hindu civilizations. He published his findings in a text titled Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham, in which he gave a list of hieroglyphic symbols, their meaning (either as sounds or words) and their Arabic equivalent. El Daly compared Ibn Wahshiyya’s conclusions on hieroglyphics with Egyptologists’ modern-day understanding of them and found them to be accurate. El Daly emphasized that, because of their prejudices about Islam, Western scholars have been unfair to classical Muslim Egyptologists. “Western culture misinterprets Islam because we [in the West] think teaching [of civilizations] before the Qur’an is shunned, which isn’t the case,” he said. “They valued history and assumed Egypt was a land of science and wisdom and as such they wanted to learn their language to have access to such vast knowledge.”
@@abuamanah9176
Spare us the rosy propaganda nonsense and spin!
“We should not flatter people at the expense of truth” - Abouna Zakaria Botros
Muslim majority rulers imposed the Jizya, a harsh tax for remaining Christian, on Copts. Their tongues were cut out for speaking in Coptic instead of Arabic. The Copts, direct descendants of the pharaohs, were relegated to second class citizenry for 14 centuries. After the Arab conquest of Egypt, the Coptic language was still in use and it was spoken until the time of the caliphate Al Hahkim Be Amr Allah. He attacked the Coptic language and ordered a decree to cease the use of the Coptic language in the houses, public places, and churches. The punishment for whoever talked in Coptic was the cutting of their tongue off. He even applied this rule to the women, and children, both boys and girls. If any parent speaks to their children in Coptic then they will cut off their tongues. This continued for the rulers who came after the Hahkim.
If not for Copts, there would not be Egyptology today. Copts are the ethnoreligious group that preserved Coptic, the final stage of the Egyptian language, alive despite relentless Islamic rulers’ oppression, discrimination, and persecution.
•••
One notable early western collector of Egyptian relics: con artist Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism.
6:52 + - wisdom turned by had together gives a power to be boxed and used for rotation motion ( drill ) or signal power
I've got a series of videos on this same topic on my channel if anyone is interested to learn some other details, like what came out of Arabic efforts to translate Hieroglyphs, and how Champollion learned Coptic!
Give link please? 😊 Interested in learning Coptic!
@@shiva-om-shiva-om I'm afraid my series is not a resource for learning Coptic, it's just about the history of deciphering hieroglyphs:
ruclips.net/video/DtOQPB1KRdY/видео.html
Here is a playlist of Coptic lessons I have saved, though - I can't attest to its quality as I haven't watched through myself yet, but I have it saved because I'm also interested in Coptic as someone who has studied Middle Egyptian:
ruclips.net/video/6JlNTGDSStQ/видео.html&ab_channel=ChristianYouthChannel
2:01 sounds like he was fun at parties
gut
a circle (nowadays it's a square with a dash) used to be the symbol for the sun in chinese too
Good story nicely told. Not often anybody has reason to feel gratitude towards Napoleon.
Many people would actually do, not the least the Poles who got their independence from Prussia/Russia for a short bit thanks to him.
@@JackOpulski And there was I believing him to be a selfish, egotistical little twxx, responsible for the deaths and maimings of hundreds of thousands of soldiers in his own armies and those ranged against him. But if he accidentally liberated the Poles for a few years - well that's alright then. Top bloke!
@@trailingarm63 Most of the Napoleonic wars are actually the British pushing their allies around to gang up on France (they even had a Czar assassinated because he was friendly with Napoleon). How evil and selfish that Napoleon would fight people who keep declaring war on his country and murdering his allies right?
@@JackOpulski I accept that perspectives can differ dramatically but nations did not ally with Britain through love of the Union Jack. They did so for collective security because they did not want a continental superpower in the form of France.
@@trailingarm63 More like their little status quo was threatened and they didn't like it. "Protection"? but somehow nobody had to feel threatened with britain extending their colonial empire world-wide?
5:38 positive ,negative ,power capture, signal , travel
Deciphering the Rosetta Stone followed almost exactly the deciphering of cuneiform based I think on Old Person from a multi language cliff inscription. Coptic should have almost made hieroglyphs obvious. Champollion's real genius was like someone solving someone else's crossword puzzle where the original solver got several of the words wrong.