How do we know accurate translations of Egyptian hieroglyphs?
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Like others have said, the multilingual inscription of the Rosetta Stone was the key! In particular, since I’m not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet (sorry if you have!), the Egyptians wrote the names of kings in cartouches (little bubbles, representative of eternity). This gave the folks trying to decipher them a clue that what was in the cartouches were likely the same words across each of the inscriptions. This was especially handy since Egyptian hieroglyphs have no other ‘punctuation’, making it hard to line up which parts of each inscription corresponded. Letters which occurred in the names of several of the mentioned rulers (e.g. Ptolemy/Ptolmys and Cleopatra/Kleopatra) were able to be identified, eg. the sign for a simple ‘P’ and ‘T’. These were amongst the first identified signs – a lot more work followed of course, to figure out the remaining several thousand and how the language itself was organized!
It’s worth mentioning that the British and the French weren’t the only ones working on this. Arabic scholars had been working on deciphering hieroglyphs and had made inroads even earlier. But naturally the British and the French like to take the lion’s share of the credit.
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