Although written in Greek, all three languages were engraved with the same inscription, at that time, no scholars could interpret the ancient Egyptian folk characters and hieroglyphics. During the six years that Grenoble studied ancient sayings and history, many scholars tried to decipher Rosetta's inscription. At first, people found that the king's name "Ptolemy" appeared frequently in the corresponding Greek and Egyptian inscriptions, thus understanding the dots in hieroglyphic texts. Other commonly used words, such as "Temple", "Egypt" and "Greece", have also been determined accordingly. However, among these isolated words, there are large hieroglyphs that don't seem to match Greek. Jean Fran?ois Champollion is very interested in oriental languages, especially Coptic in ancient Egypt. Just when the decoding work was in trouble, he decided to devote himself to solving the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
After seven years' research, Jean-Franois Jean Fran?ois Champollion took ancient Greek as the key to interpret the other two languages and took proper nouns in Greek as the clue to find the corresponding words in the ancient Egyptian version. This discovery enabled him to understand the pronunciation of many ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. He used his knowledge of Coptic to associate other hieroglyphs with their corresponding pronunciations. Jean Fran? Ois Champollion stayed in the Louvre Museum in Paris all day, studying copies of the Rosetta Stone and other Egyptian documents in various libraries in Paris (he was allowed to study the original Rosetta Stone preserved in the Louvre Museum). He tried to read the meaning of Coptic from hieroglyphics, and gradually learned to read subtle hieroglyphics in a way that ancient Egyptians understood. For example, in a hieroglyph, the figure of an eagle may obviously represent the word "eagle", but in some contexts, the same symbol may only represent the letter "A"-the first letter of the Egyptian word "eagle". In another case, the same hieroglyphic symbol can be read as the Egyptian word "swift"-this is one of the characteristics of the eagle. For another example, Egyptians sometimes do not use the word "king", but carve a series of hieroglyphics, whose strict literal meaning is "he of reeds and bees"-this is one of the official titles of the king; In other places, "Pharaoh" means "he in the grand palace" and can also be used to describe the king.
Jean Fran? Ois Champollion began to weave these different meanings with many other Coptic Egyptian words and phrases into an understandable system. At the end of this year, he began to translate a complete line of hieroglyphics in the Rosetta inscription, and confidently mastered the different meanings of more than a dozen individual hieroglyphs. Some of these symbols are letters, some are syllabic characters, and some are semantic symbols. A symbol represents a whole. Realizing that it is risky to announce the decoding success to the outside world in advance, he kept his research results secret.
1824, he completed the full-text translation of rossetter inscriptions, compiled a complete comparison table of Egyptian symbols and Greek letters, and published many research papers, which provided a very useful tool for later interpreting a large number of papyrus documents left over from ancient Egypt. He also found a papyrus with a list of all Egyptian pharaohs. He summarized the results as "Egyptian hieroglyphic system" and submitted it to the French Academy of Sciences.
At first, his view was questioned by other scholars, but as more and more hieroglyphs were translated according to his method, people all admitted that he broke the silence of hieroglyphics 1800 years. This year marks the official birth of Egyptology. Jean Fran?ois Champollion's profound attainments in Egyptian studies led French King Charles X to buy him a residence in Turin Museum, where he could decipher more Egyptian characters.
Soon, Jean Fran? Ois Champollion was appointed as a professor of ancient history at Grenoble University, which helped him get rid of poverty.