[eli5] How were gerogliphs understood and what was Rosettas stone role in the process.
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Can you expand a bit on “gerogliphs”, as that’s not a term I’m familiar with. Is English not your first language perhaps? Can you do some translating and see if you mean “Hieroglyphics?”
The Rosetta Stone was an edict from the government about some policy changes. These policy changes were so important that they were written out in three different languages so that _everyone_ in the area could read and understand them.
Since we already understood one of the languages on the tablet and we knew that the other text said the exact same thing, it allowed us to start to decipher specific words in the unknown language. Once we had a minimal understanding, we could use that to look at _other_ documents and start piecing together new words using context clues.
Deze tekst is in twee talen geschreven. De eerste taal bovenaan is Nederlands, de tweede onderaan is Engels. Doordat de tekst twee keer dezelfde is, is het eenvoudiger om te vertalen tussen de twee, ook als je er maar één kent.
This text is written in two languages. The first language at the top is Dutch, and the second at the bottom is English. Since the text is the same twice, it is easier to translate between the two, even if you only know one.
On the Rosetta Stone was written a decree in the 3 languages spoken in Egypt when it was written – Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek. We assumed that the Pharaoh who wrote it wanted it to say the same thing in the 3 languages written. Since we knew one of the languages, we could decode that the text written in hieroglyphs meant the exact same thing as the text written in Greek.
The geoglyphs are in Peru and the Rosetta stone was in Egypt, so I assume you mean hieroglyphics.
The Rosetta stone was a notice of change in government policy. It was written in hieroglyphics, Greek, and Egyptian (the written language of the commoners)
At the time, Egypt was under the Ptolemaic dynasty (who were Macedonian and spoke Greek). The formal written language of important documents was hieroglyphics, and the commoners who could read and write only knew Egyptian. They wanted to make sure that everyone could understand this document, so they wrote it in Greek and Egyptian, and added hieroglyphics because of how official the document was.
When the French found it, we could read ancient Greek, and we figured out that the 3 sections of the Rosetta stone all said the same thing, so we were able to decode the other two languages easily.
To help with the gap you’re struggling with — it’s critical to understand that a) the demotic and hieroglyphic sections were functionally the same text, 2 different ways of writing the same Ancient Egyptian, and b) the translators had access to the basic structure of the language they were looking for which is preserved in Coptic, used especially in the Christian population of Egypt, which is a more modern version of Ancient Egyptian in roughly the same way that Italian is a modern version of Latin.
Step 1 of using the Rosetta Stone was figuring out how demotic worked — which is a simplified writing style from hieroglyphics, with many but not all characters acting like letters in an alphabet, and which influenced the Coptic alphabet so it wasn’t a total unknown. They knew the translation of the text from the Greek and thus could figure out what sorts of sounds they were looking for by knowing what that text should look like in Coptic. This was still a lot of work, but eventually they were able to be confident that they understood how the demotic worked and could sound out the Egyptian text of the top two sections of the stele.
Step 2 was figuring out the rules for how hieroglyphs worked to make the sounds that they knew from the Demotic script that had now been worked out. Hieroglyphs are more complicated and not really easily directly related to known scripts like Coptic, so they needed demotic first to be able to figure out what the hieroglyphs were saying.
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