SUBTITLES:
Subtitles generated by robot
00:08
thank you very much I'm talking about
Egyptian of course which is a later
script I'm going to really focus on the
decipherment and how it was done
i-i'll be frank with you it'll be a
somewhat in fact strongly biographical
talk about how Thomas Young and Sean
Paul Young worked on it and it's a real
honor to be in the same place that
Thomas Young was all those two centuries
ago now this building is a rather
00:40
unusual place called the Egyptian Hall
it was in Piccadilly but nobody will
remember it now because it was
demolished in 1905 it was built in 1812
and it lasted you know century or so and
it was inspired by gypsum mania which
started really with the Napoleon's
expedition to Egypt a very strange and
wonderful exhibition opened in May 1821
01:11
in the Egyptian Hall and it was 2,000
visitors paid half a crown on the first
day it's quite a lot of money to see it
and it lasted a whole year and inside
what was remarkable was the first scale
model of an Egyptian tomb to be shown in
London 15 meters long and two full-size
reproductions of chambers in the tomb
and it was from what was later called
the Valley of the Kings so there was a
01:44
huge crowd to see it paintings were made
on site in Egypt and here are some of
them the artist was Alessandro Ricci
he's not very well known now but he was
a medical doctor from Siena Italian and
he'd saved the life of the Egyptian
Pasha's son in Egypt and then he
traveled extensively in Egypt and become
a painter
at the top of the this bas-relief is the
02:16
vulture goddess Nekhbet and underneath
the oval signs I think they're pretty
clear here a cartouche is they're called
cartouche is as you probably know and
they were thought to the signs inside
them were thought to be the names of
goddesses and gods and pharaohs but of
course nobody could read them in 1821
nobody at all the most remarkable thing
02:47
I think in the exhibition was this
sarcophagus made out of alabaster it's
it arrived rather late from Egypt
actually in August well after the
opening of the exhibition but it was
soon the center of attention it was
almost three meters long and it's carved
with hieroglyphs originally known in as
the color is originally known as
Egyptian blue it's actually calcium
copper tetra silicate and the
03:20
sarcophagus was then sold three years
later it was given to the British Museum
who decided not to buy it and it was
given to or sold to sone the architect
John Soane Sir John Soane in 1824 for
2,000 pounds and you can see it today in
London in the Sohn Museum in the
basement rather atmospherically lit and
I do recommend it it's well worth a
visit if you haven't seen it now the man
who had discovered the tomb in 1817 was
03:54
this man Giovanni belzoni another
Italian and as you may know he's quite
famous in his way he was a circus
strongman turned Egyptologist rather an
odd combination and he was a flamboyant
showman on the very day that the
exhibition opened he appeared in front
of the press and the audience wrapped in
mummy bandages
and they were then unwrapped to reveal
him now his book which is a great
04:27
pictorial study of his Egyptian
adventures came out in 1820 and almost a
century later Howard Carter the English
archaeologist was inspired by that book
Belle's own his book to look for another
tomb and of course he found it the tomb
of Tutankhamun
now according to belzoni the to me
discovered which was on show in the
Egyptian Hall was assumed to be or
presumed to be the tomb of Sammis PSA mm
04:57
is now nobody could be sure because as
I've said nobody could read the
hieroglyphs not even the Greeks and
Romans could read them the knowledge was
lost except to the Egyptians themselves
and their priests so this was guesswork
and the guess had come from Thomas Young
who's already been mentioned now young
I don't probably need to say much about
perhaps I can summarize him by saying
I've written a biography of young called
05:30
the last man who knew everything
jokingly but I must say when I worked on
it I got pretty exhausted even learning
how many subjects he'd got involved with
he was foreign secretary of the Royal
Society he was former professor of
natural philosophy at ERI and he was a
doctor and he was a physiologist of the
eye and of course if you're a physicist
you know he was a young Slits very
famous and he was a linguist he invented
06:01
the term indo-european and really a lot
of other things including work in life
insurance of all things quite well paid
now he was unsure about Sammis as the
name of the Pharaoh buried in the tomb
he was a speculation and when the tomb
was taken the exhibition was taken to
Paris by bells only in 1822 before
06:32
yeah it's an interesting fact that Samus
was not given the name of the Pharaoh in
the catalogue there was no sign of Samus
and the reason for that is that the
notes for the catalog and in fact the
whole catalogue had been written by not
Thomas Young and not belzoni but the key
figure in this story
jean-francois Champollion and here he is
in later life now in 1822 at the time
07:04
the exhibition sham polyol in France had
made a startling announcement that he
could read the cartouche is of some late
Egyptian rulers like Alexander Cleopatra
and Ptolemy but he was not yet confident
of reading the earlier Egyptian rulers
before the Greek period such as in
quotes Samus and obviously the owner of
the tomb was an early Egyptian ruler not
a late one so he didn't identify it and
07:35
what happened next is that seanpauley
are as we'll come to in more detail
later suddenly started making progress
so after 1822 the decipherment took off
in the 1820s and soon he was able to
actually come up with the name of the
ruler and it turned out of the tomb to
be set off or SETI the first who had
died we now know in 1279 BC and probably
more famously his son was Ramses the
08:06
second Ramses the great so we now know
that thanks to sham Poli on now the key
of course to the decipherment was the
rosetta stone and i'm not showing you
the familiar image of the rosetta stone
yet as you can easily see this is a
model from france the stone was
originally discovered in 1799 by the
French Army in Egypt it's now in the
British Museum
08:38
captured in Egypt by the British Army in
1801 that is actually written in English
on the side of the stone if you go and
have a look it's quite hard to read but
it is still visible now the copy I'm
showing you is from a French town called
for Jack in southwestern France and the
edge of the massive stone trowel and
this model is a hundred times the area
of the Rosetta Stone in the British
Museum and it's made out of black
09:09
granite from Zimbabwe by an American
conceptual artist in 1919 their dates
important because that's the bicentenary
of jean-paul eons birth info jack in
1790 so this was created to celebrate
his by centenary there's the street in
which he was born he was born on the
upper level on the right in one of those
rooms up there and it's now the street
09:39
is called the UM Puffs seanpauley on in
his honor
now I'm not gonna say much about his
parents because they didn't have much
influence on his life his father was a
bookseller but was the crucial figure
and I will talk about him because he's
very important is his elder brother of
Jean polio Jacques Josef seanpauley ah
who's quite a good scholar in his own
right in later years
Jacques Josef is shown here in his 20s
and he was 12 years older than Jean
10:12
Francois and he effectively was in loco
parentis he took over and brought up the
boy I think it's true it's quite a claim
but without Jacques Joseph's financial
and emotional support for Jean Francois
and also his savoir faire he really was
a practical figure who knew how to get
things done I think nobody would have
heard of Jean Francois today the elder
brother was absolutely crucial and after
the younger brother's death
10:45
the older brother said quite movingly I
think I was by turns
his father his master and his pupil and
that's certainly true from the record
now just briefly Jacques Josef moved to
Grenoble from for Jack in 1798 he took
up a job there and then his younger
brother joined him in 1801 when he was
only 11 years old and he started living
in the same house as his elder brother
11:18
amongst a huge and growing library of
books because Jacques Joseph had very
strong scholarly ambitions so the young
boy was living there until 1804 and that
when he was 14 and then I have to say
the elder brother insisted for financial
reasons I suspect that he go and bored
in the local lycée which had just been
established the government school in
Grenoble under Napoleonic law in 1804 in
11:50
some ways this was a disaster because it
was under military discipline and there
were rather appalling stories about sort
of riots and the dormitories and Jean
Francois was fairly defenseless but he
and he much disliked the place but he
had to stay there's a letter charming
letter from him here you don't have to
read the details of course but this is
written to his brother in 1804 to seven
12:22
and that line says Lu dollfie Ethiopia
gramatica and that's a Latin grammar of
the Ethiopia crypt and he was requesting
at this teenage early teenage these very
scholarly books he wanted his brothers
who provide them for his research but
there's a rather nice rather piteous PS
at the side here hope you can see June a
pod the book clip would make Hulot I
don't have any buckles for my trousers
12:55
which gives you a little hint of how he
was living at this time the the misery
is probably not too strong a word
ended in eight
seven he was able to come home and live
with his brother again because he was
permitted to study at home the school
allowed him to do that and the man who
who allowed it was this man Joseph
Fourier who is an honored name in an
institution like this he's a
mathematician and physicist of real note
13:25
the Fourier series but from our point of
view tonight it's not mathematics and
physics that matter it's the fact that
Fourier had gone with Napoleon to Egypt
in 1799 or 1798 and Fourier was a key
scholar probably the key scholar with
Napoleon he was Secretary of the asti -
they shipped and when he came back to
France with Napoleon he he took up the
13:56
editing of a great volume called the
description though they heaped which was
the government publication based on all
the discoveries made by Napoleon's
soldiers and scholars that came out over
many years and Fourier was the the was
the editor to begin with and he was
helped in Grenoble and this is crucial
by unofficially helped by Jacques Joseph
Shung Palio and the younger brother who
14:28
was helping his elder brother to help
Fourier they did research for him
although they weren't acknowledged but I
think that it's fair to say it was
through this absolutely hands-on
exposure to ancient Egyptian monuments
and drawings and all the things that
were brought back that Jacques Joseph
and Jean Francois became passionate
about ancient Egypt so that's how he got
introduced to it the young boy or the
teenager Fourier sort of took him up as
15:00
well and he introduced him to a Greek
Catholic priest who proved quite crucial
because he taught the boy Coptic guided
him anyway
then jean-francois started teaching
himself and Coptic was thought to be the
language
of the late Egyptian period or at least
related to it I don't have time to say
much about Coptic but the idea was that
if he could learn Coptic it might help
him to understand late Egyptian
inscriptions so that proved quite
15:31
fruitful and Fourier also sent him to
Paris in 1807 which was hugely important
to study ancient languages and his
professor was this man Silvestre de
sassy and there's no time to speak much
about him but he's an interesting
character in his own right he was at the
School of Oriental languages in Paris
seanpauley on with his student and they
16:03
admired each other up to a point but
they had also terrible moments in later
life where daggers really are drawn
between decision seanpauley or partly
for political reasons as I'll mentioned
later but also I think de sus he had an
ambition to use the Rosetta Stone to
decipher the hieroglyphs so the student
was really something of a rival and he
didn't really encourage him as a result
now here's a copy of the stone ah the
very first ever done ever made by
16:34
lithography in Cairo in 1800 by French
scholars before it was captured needless
to say now it can be read through the
Greek translation at the bottom and as I
expect everyone here knows the
hieroglyphs are at the top broken badly
broken here in the middle is the demotic
section which is a later Egyptian script
and the the Greek section is is this bit
at the bottom which is also somewhat
broken and the Greek section turned out
17:07
to be readable in alphabetic script of
course and it is an edict of King
Ptolemy v epiphanies dated 196 BC and
the really crucial thing about it is
that the Greek states in the last line I
think that the three inscriptions are
equivalent in meaning not exact ons lay
of each other but equivalent in meaning
so the Greek was going to be obviously a
clue to reading the other two and that's
17:38
the importance of the rosetta stone of
course now seanpauley all took up the
study in 1808 he was still very young
and he worked at it in various ways till
1815 working on the rosetta stone but he
didn't make a breakthrough
he made various contributions but
nothing really got going then he
abandoned it for a while and the reason
is politics which is always part of his
life and the pole Ian came back from
18:10
Elba and 1815 landed with some soldiers
came straight to Grenoble and they must
have gulped loudly but they opened the
the gates and Napoleon came in and these
are the people welcoming Napoleon
including the shampo Leon brothers
Jacques shows have actually became
Napoleon's secretary went with him to
Paris Jean Francois was left behind to
edit the government Gazette and on the
18:41
very day of the Battle of Waterloo he
rather unwisely wrote in the government
Gazette Napoleon is our legitimate
Prince so he suffered both of them
suffered after Napoleon's fall pretty
badly they were exiled from for Jack
they lost their jobs in Grenoble and to
make matters worse to Sassie who was a
royalist through and through actually
told Thomas young in a letter Thomas
19:12
Young was in London and the SAS he roped
him saying that my former student is a
potential plagiarist of your work and
probably a charlatan he used the word so
things had got pretty bad for poor old
seanpauley are now young I have to say
something about young and his work and
I'll try and keep it as concise as
possible he published a really
remarkable article in the encyclopedia
britannica in 1819 simply called egypt
19:43
based on his work
in London over the previous four years
and he shows the last line of the
rosetta stone in this drawing and he
said I can spot striking resemblances as
he put it between the demotic symbol
esteemed Tyra glyphic symbols at the top
and the demotic underneath it's of
course is the Greek on the third line
this is the last line of the rosetta
20:13
stone and if you really study it you can
see other resemblances and Yung really
did study that was quite clear he was
obsessive from his papers in the British
Library you can see that but there are a
lot of signs and demotic that do not
resemble hieroglyphs and he also
recognized that so he speculated that
there was a striking resemblance between
certain corresponding hieroglyphs and
the demotic signs but that it was
20:44
probably a mixed script demotic it was
probably imitations of the hieroglyphs
mixed with letters of the alphabet
to quote young but he was unsure in
others he was suggesting a phonetic
element in the demotic script in
addition to a symbolic element but he
was unsure whether the hieroglyphs also
had phonetic elements as most people did
including the Greeks and Romans believed
they were purely symbolic without any
phonetic signs so he decided to
21:15
investigate that by using an idea of
discusses the SAS he had actually
suggested well let's look at the Greek
names and the rosetta stone like Ptolemy
that's the key name and see whether we
can compare the our experiment Allah me
with the Greek spelling now that of
course is the cartouche of Ptolemy and I
can't go into much detail for lack of
time but the idea was that Jung had is
21:48
let's compare the two and see whether we
can give some fanatic values to the
signs of
the name toll meas as it is spelt in
Greek and I think you can see fairly
easily that the hieroglyphs are on the
left from the name of Ptolemy then
there's Jung suggested phonetic value in
the middle and then today's value
accepted by Egyptologists and he did a
fairly good job he didn't get it quite
22:20
right he then went further he took
another cartouche of a late Egyptian
ruler called Queen Baron Ichi and he
analyzed that in the same way and then
he came up with this chart in the
Encyclopedia Britannica in 1819 sounds
questionmark said young he was cautious
based on the same principle of
comparison with the Greek and Egyptology
today recognized that of the signs that
22:53
he'd identified six are correct three
are partly correct and four are
incorrect so it was a mixed picture he
did even go further than that rather
remarkably he compared eighty demotic
words with their hieroglyphic
equivalents translated with the help of
the Greek and you can see here the
cartouche of Ptolemy and here the
cartouche of queen Baron Ichi and lots
of other words so he compared the two
23:26
and those 80 equivalents are still
accepted today so he was really making
progress but as ever with Jung he was
distracted by his polymath II and after
1819 after he published this great
article he doesn't make further progress
he's he didn't exactly abandon ancient
Egypt but he stops making progress gets
involved with other things including
longitude and problems like that it's
only in the late 1820s Jung returns to
23:58
Egypt or to the study of ancient Egypt
and with it's nice to say some help from
seanpauley on despite the fact they were
rivals Jung
becomes the decipher of demotic not the
hieroglyphs of course which is
seanpauley on but demotic is really
Young's achievement but that's that's
later
now seanpauley on was having a pretty
bad time still in France while Young was
busy in England he'd returned from for
24:30
Jack his hometown in 1817 to Grenoble
but the royalist authorities in Grenoble
dead set against him and they later
tried to put him on trial for leading a
rebellion for treason but he the
government in Paris intervened and say
he got off but things were really bad in
eighteen seventeen to twenty one he did
manage to marry he married regime blah a
local woman son of a daughter of a
Glover and they had a daughter's ohrid
25:04
but essentially he abandoned a gypped
ancient Egypt for three or four years
and he thought of becoming first a
teacher just to earn money and then a
notary and she'd giving up entirely the
study of Egypt but there is one
publication from April 1821 it's a small
booklet on the Egyptian script by Jean
Paul II on obviously in French and
unfortunately for him it does contain a
25:33
real blunder because he says that there
are no phonetic values in the demotic or
hieroglyphic signs he says they stand
for things not sounds in other words
they're symbolic not phonetic and he
knew he'd made a blunder pretty quickly
and he tried to withdraw the booklet and
I was amused because when I was writing
his biography I went to the British
Library which has one of the very few
copies of this booklet and the French
curator said I can't find it
26:04
so I thought maybe sham polyols ghost
has removed it and then three or four
years later the curator said when my
paperback came out well I think we've
finally found it so it was just a bit of
mislaid in the library but they're
extremely rare and that's because jean
paulhan was embarrassed he wanted to get
rid of it and he never refers to it in
his later work so in July he's forced to
leave Grenoble and he goes really in
despair to Paris and lives with his
26:37
brother and he thought maybe that was
the end of his career but in fact it
turned out to be the absolutely right
thing for him to do it was a great boon
he lived here in the room as arene
number 28 he and his brother and the
family and the Asti to de france is
visible in the distance the dome of it
where the brother was working as a in
the academy of ancient inscriptions and
bel leche and there he started to read
Thomas Young's work by his own admission
27:09
he claimed he hadn't read the
Encyclopedia Britannica article until
1821 possible but I'm not totally
convinced but he certainly admitted
reading it in the house in Paris and he
never really admits what he got out of
it there are hints but there are also
things that are contradictory so great
argument starts between young and
jean-paul er and it's really gone on for
two centuries nobody can really totally
27:39
say what young contributed because
seanpauley on kept quiet among about
some things maybe they were his research
maybe it was Young's ideas that had
prompted him but he certainly does make
a breakthrough in 1822 the following
year although tis reminiscence of
Young's and now at analytical approach
with Ptolemy and Baron Ichi it involves
Cleopatra another name from late Egypt
28:09
not one of the early Egyptian rulers and
the clue as to the fact that this was
her cartouche came from an obelisk which
had been brought back by belzoni are
from Egypt and it was brought back to
England and it's now actually you can
see it still in the in Dorset in the
garden of a house
and it was published in 1821 in November
and sham polio must have seen it soon
after that in the published version and
the really crucial thing about it is
28:42
that the obelisk the shaft of the
obelisk has - car - she's on it and on
the Greek base block it's a bilingual
like the rosetta stone there are two
names in Greek Ptolemy and Cleopatra so
it was a pretty fair guess that the
second cartouche or the first was
Ptolemy is and the second was
Cleopatra's so sham Pauline tried the
same approach of comparing the the
Egyptian signs with the Greek alphabetic
29:12
phonetic values and he came up with this
analysis Cleopatra on the left and
Tomi's on the right and I think you can
see pretty quickly that there are signs
in common which is how it should be if
the system is correctly analyzed but the
sign for T in Tommy's are sorry the sign
for T here the hand sign differs from
the half circle here so there is a
29:44
difference there are two different signs
for the same sound but seanpauley all
said well that occurs in many languages
it's known as homophony and Incas in
English for instance was Jill spelt Gi
double L or ji double L or Catherine
spelt with a seal with a K so it wasn't
a reasonable it wasn't an unreasonable
speculation that this he got it right
although there are two different signs
for the same sound in some cases now he
30:17
went much further and rather brilliantly
looked at this cartouche that had been
brought back in a drawing by a french
architect who visited abu simble the
temple at Abu Simbel and seanpauley all
looked at this in September 1822 in
Paris and he said I can read the signs
on the right the two hooks they are the
S from Tommy's there's no doubt about
that then he said I think I
read the sign on the left it is the
30:48
circle with the dot it looks like the
Sun and the Coptic for Sun was raw or
Ray so he had he thought of the idea it
started ray and ended SS and at some
point the idea occurred to him that
maybe this was the cartouche of an early
Egyptian ruler Ramses
nobody knew a damn thing about Ramses in
1822 except that he appeared in a Greek
31:19
Ptolemaic historians chronicle of
ancient Egypt
a man called manna though a famous
priest and so seanpauley own was aware
of that he thought well Sean Ramsey's
must have been a historical figure I'll
take a chance maybe this is Rameses
cartouche from Abu Simbel and he then
took another step which is much more
difficult to understand but the sign in
the middle
he said I've seen that sign in the
middle with the hook sign in the rosetta
31:49
stone where it is translated into Greek
as Genelia and Ganassi it means give
birth and the Coptic for Ganesha is is
is me say M is e so maybe he speculated
this is the sign for M or M s now we can
see that as wishful thinking in a way
but he turned out he was right this is
the cartouche of Ramses
32:20
and supposedly on the 14th of September
1822 Shambala on jean francois goes
round his brother in the institute of
france
slaps the papers at noon on his desk he
says dirty Amana fair I've done it a
Eureka collapses on the floor and his
elder brother is quite fearful he's had
a stroke and even possibly died but it
turns out he's just dog tired he goes
home he rests and five days later he
32:54
gives a really important speech which is
probably the most important speech he
ever gave
published later as the left for a Moose
Jaw dossier a month later in October and
in this let for seanpauley on claims to
read the alphabetic hieroglyphs as he
calls them of the Greek and Roman rulers
of Egypt he doesn't claim that he can
read the early Egyptian names and in
fact Ramses is not mentioned in the
letter it's only later he starts to
convince himself that he can he'd been
33:26
read much more of the script there's a
table of phonetic signs in the let very
famous in Egyptology table day scene
phonetic but you can see there are many
separate symbols for one sign here the
Greek Sigma for instance there are lots
of hieroglyphic symbols all very
different so this is the demotic here he
hasn't cracked it but he's got made some
33:56
progress and he signed himself very
proudly in the sham Palio in phonetic
egyptian which gives you some idea of
his sense of humor and of course his
pride in his work and this is finally
him before he becomes famous this is the
he's holding the tablet he seen phonetic
in 1823 and it's a famous portrait now
his career really takes off in a sense
he becomes internationally known he's
34:27
taken up by the King of France through
the Duke of black ah who's a loyal
friend and the King appoints him as
curator of Egyptian antiquities the very
first one at the Louvre and Muse in
Paris in 1826 and then to his his life's
dream comes true the King says I will
fund you to go to Egypt as an expedition
we will give half the money and the
ruler of Tuscany will give the other
half and you will be accompanied by
Eppolito Rosselini who was the
35:00
second-in-command a tuscan scholar who
was a great admirer of jean-paul er well
as I say his dream came true he went he
landed as Alexandre in August 1828 he
was
boats by the Pasha of Egypt and the
expedition it's a wonderful story sailed
up the Nile right up to the second
cataract or just short of it beyond Abu
Simbel and all the way they were
stopping to look at these monuments and
inscriptions and seanpauley on was in
his element because he was able to start
35:32
reading them for the first time since
antiquity nobody had been able to do it
for 2,000 years and then they they
turned the boat round they sailed all
the way back and they stopped at other
sites on the way back
including Thebes and it was it was in
effect of indication of his system there
were many problems but it worked it was
very obvious
there's painting of the expedition here
gives you a bit of idea of the
atmosphere here is seanpauley or looking
36:04
like a Bedouin with a sword and he was
speaking fluent Arabic so he could have
probably passed as a better and this is
Rosselini dressed in in in in standing
with white and red and they were close
to each other as people as well as
scholars there's a portrait or sorry a a
little drawing of seanpauley indeed of
the tomb of Ramses the fourth where they
stayed for six months in the coolness to
36:36
get away from the Sun and it's rather
charming because it shows all the beds
of the expedition including moi for
himself and Rosselini
is opposite and then there's a little
portrait of the cat's bed and the
gazelles bed and at the top is the
sarcophagus of Ramses probably my I'm
missing it yeah that's the so they were
the sarcophagus was brooding over them
as they were living in the in the tomb
and sometimes seanpauley was so excited
he would collapse on the floor with the
sheer drama of what he was experiencing
37:09
translating these inscriptions he even
left some graffiti you can see it today
in Karnak and he used the old family
spelling sham poor lay all of his name
which Napoleon rather admired he said he
has ha
of my name it's a good sign so there's a
bit of sham Polly of we can enjoy even
today he returned to Paris in 1829 at
the end of the earth
37:39
he'd been away for a year now his system
was sort of proven but not fully and he
really had to work damn hard in the
years that remain to him to try and
organize his papers and get some
publications out but I'm afraid he
didn't have long to live in 1831 he was
appointed the world's first professor of
Egyptology at the collège de France but
his health was really deteriorating
38:11
probably due to diseases he'd picked up
in Egypt in late 1831 he definitely
suffered a stroke and he continued to
work a bit longer on his grammar
Egyptian grammar with his brother his
ever loyal brother and then he gave it
to jock Joseph with the following words
he said look after it I hope it will be
my visiting card to posterity soon he
could no longer speak and in March 1832
he's only 41 apparently according his
38:42
family that night on the 3rd of March he
let out a groan and they heard him say
what they thought was in French now for
the afterlife on to Egypt on to Thebes
which is where he felt he really
belonged now I'll finish with that which
I'm sure you'll recognise the cartouche
of Tutankhamun discovered by Howard
Carter in a century law after seanpauley
on his legacy
39:15
took a while to be established as I just
said long after his death people were
still arguing about it in fact it took
until the 1860s before it was really
accepted but we can use it to read
Tutankhamun today and I'll try and do
that quickly for you this is a phonetic
sign T UT toot
that's a symbol UNK the hooked cross so
that's toutes UNK and then the God's
39:46
name our moon is at the top that's a
fanatic symbol and then a by consonantal
sign our moon and that's a phonetic
column compliment for n to emphasize the
N in in the by continental sign and at
the bottom this is crucial these are
three symbols meaning ruler of
Heliopolis of upper egypt ie ruler of
Thebes so there's no phonetic symbols at
all at the bottom so it's a mixed script
40:16
just like the demotic phonetic values
and symbolic values or logograms as we
call them now signs for words and so
seanpauley honor got it right he said in
1824 ahead of any other scholar in the
world he said hieroglyphic writing is a
complex system a script all at once
figurative symbolic and phonetic in one
in the same text in one on the same
sentence and iMeet might even venture in
one and the same word and I really will
40:49
finish now by just saying to me this is
not I mean it's absolutely essential to
Egyptologists but to me the story of the
cracking of this code is fascinating for
another reason because it did require a
polymath Thomas Young and it did require
a specialist shampo liang to crack the
code without without this combination I
don't think it would have been sold or
at least not for a long time and the
41:21
broad mind of young in eighteen fourteen
to eighteen really does have certain
insights which are totally invaluable to
seanpauley on whether he admitted it or
not a shivani all failed at that time
right up to 1821 but then after 1821 he
took Jung's insights probably and then
his narrow focus his tunnel vision took
over and that was really what took the
decipherment forward
41:51
so I think it's fair to say that you
need the the broad vision of young and
the fanatical focus of sham polyol for
this revolutionary insight which sham
polio alone announced in the 1820s thank
you
[Applause]
you
Watch, read, educate! © 2022