Letter with Mr. Dacier

See also: Dacier

The Letter with Mr. Dacier… is the text in which Jean-François Champollion exposes, in 1822, its discovery of a system of deciphering of the Hiéroglyphe S.

Extracts:

“Sir,

I must with kindness with which you honor me the lenient interest that the royal Académie of the Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres agreed to grant to my work on the Egyptian writings, while enabling me to subject my two memories to him on the hieratic or sacerdotal writing, and on the demotic or popular writing; I will dare finally, after this so flattering test for me, to hope to have succeeded in showing that these two species of writing are, one and the other, not alphabetical, as it had been thought so generally, but ideographic S, like the same hiéroglyphes, i.e. painting the ideas and not the sounds of a language; and to believe to be parvenu after ten years of research assiduous, to join together almost complete data on the general theory of these two species of writing, on the origin, nature, the form and the number of their signs, rules of their combinations by means of those of these signs which fill of the purely logical or grammatical functions, and to have thus thrown the first bases of what one could call a grammar and the dictionary of these two writings employed in the great number of monuments whose interpretation will spread such an amount of light on the general history Egypt. With regard to the demotic writing in particular, it was enough to the invaluable inscription of Rosette to recognize the unit of it; criticism is indebted initially with the lights of your famous fellow-member Mr. Silvestre of Sacy, and successively with those of fire Akerblad and Mr. doctor Young, of the first exact concepts that one drew from this monument, and it is of this same inscription that I deducted the series from the signs demotic which, taking an syllabico-alphabetical value, expressed in the texts ideographic the proper names of the foreign characters in Egypt. It is thus still that the name of the Ptolémées was found and on this same inscription and a manuscript in papyrus recently brought from Egypt

As for the whole of the written form phonetic Egyptian (and we include/understand at the same time under denomination the popular phonetic writing and the hieroglyphic phonetic writing), it is undeniable that this system is not a purely alphabetical writing, if one must understand indeed by alphabetical a writing representing rigorously, and each one in their own order, all the sounds and all the articulations which form the words of a language. We see, indeed, the Egyptian phonetic writing, to represent the word César, according to Greek genitive KAÏSAROS, to be often satisfied to assemble the signs of the consonants, K, S, R, S, without worrying about the Diphtongue nor of the two vowels which the Greek orthography requires imperiously. One can thus assimilate the Egyptian phonetic writing, with that of old the Phéniciens, with the writings known as Hebraic, Syriaque, samaritaine, with the cufic Arab , and the Arab current; writings which one could name semi-alphabetical, because they do not offer, to some extent with the eye that the skeleton alone of the words, the Consonne S and the long vowels, leaving with the science of the reader the care to compensate the short vowels.

I already made have a presentiment of that, to return the sounds and the articulations, and to thus form a phonetic writing, the Egyptians took the hiéroglyphes appearing of the physical objects or expressing ideas whose name or word corresponding in spoken language started with the vowel or the consonant that it was a question of representing.

The bringing together which we will make expressing of the hieroglyphic signs the consonants with the Egyptian words expressing the objects that these same hiéroglyphes represents, will raise any uncertainty on the truth of the principle. ”

Jean-François Champollion, Letter with Mr. Dacier , Paris, 1822

Random links: