How do we know accurate translations of Egyptian hieroglyphs?
In: 6
Much of what we know is the result of decades of research, but the biggest breakthrough was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which contained the same official proclamation in three different scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ancient Egyptian Demotic, and Ancient Greek.
With the knowledge of Demotic and Greek already available to scholars, plus a ton of additional research and work, a basic understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs was eventually reached, which has since expanded with further research.
**Edit**: Adding some notes from a few commentors below (not linking them because I don’t know if this subreddit disallows that):
* Researchers and scholars were able to use their knowledge of the Coptic language to fill in many of the gaps, because Coptic is the closest extant language to ancient Egyptian.
* Although we do know many of the hieroglyphs, we do not know all of them- it’s not always clear what they meant and some are rare and lack context.
* While we do understand much of the language as written, the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian is still not fully known. Some can be guessed at, but it’s hard to say if we have a good grasp of what it sounded like.
Latest Answers