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Hieroglyphs: breaking the code

In 1802, a French and a Swedish scholar used similar techniques to unravel the text. They searched for the name Ptolemy, by isolating repeated groups of symbols in about the same position as the Greek inscription.
They drew up a tentative alphabet and applied it to the rest of the inscription. Other words such as 'Greek', 'Egypt', and 'temple' could be identified. But the demotic text (a cursive form of hieroglyphs) was not an alphabet, nor completely unrelated to hieroglyphic.
In 1815, an English scientist and polymath, Thomas Young, traced how the pictographic hieroglyphs, showing people, animals, plants and other objects, had developed into their abstract, cursive equivalents in demotic. Young concluded that demotic consisted of a mixture between hieroglyphics and letters of the alphabet.

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How we deciphered Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs

sciencefocus.com

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