Answer: Both the intellectual and the physical prerequisites for the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script first presented themselves at the end of the 18th century. By accident, a stone that exhibited three different scripts—hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek—was discovered by members of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1799 near Rashīd (French: Rosette; English: Rosetta) on the Mediterranean coast. The Greek text stated clearly that the document set forth the same text in the sacred script, the folk or popular script, and Greek. The stone was promptly made known to all interested scholars. Important partial successes in the effort of decipherment were achieved by the Swede Johan David Åkerblad and by the English physicist Thomas Young, who mainly studied the demotic text, again beginning with the false hypothesis that the hieroglyphs were symbols. Young succeeded in proving that they were not symbols—at least that the proper names were not—and that the demotic signs were derived from the hieroglyphs. (He first published this result in the supplement to the 4th, 5th, and 6th editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.) He was the first to isolate correctly some single-consonant hieroglyphic signs. But a wrong turn in the course of his investigations then prevented him from fully deciphering the writing.
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