Lettre à M. Dacier
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hieroglyphic
phonetic characters that appears as an illustration in the Lettre à M. DacierLettre à M. Dacier (full title: Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques: "Letter to M. Dacier concerning the alphabet of the phonetic hieroglyphs") is a letter sent in 1822 by the
hieroglyphs were first systematically deciphered by Champollion, largely on the basis of the multilingual Rosetta Stone
.
History
On 14 September 1822, while visiting his brother
hieroglyphs and proclaimed, "Je tiens l'affaire! " ("I've got it!") and then fainted from his excitement.[1]
On 27 September 1822, he exhibited at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres a draft containing eight pages of text to a packed room. The final version was published in late October 1822 by
Firmin-Didot in a booklet of 44 pages with four illustrated plates.[2]
Display at the Louvre
On the 150th anniversary of the Lettre in October 1972, the Rosetta Stone was displayed next to it at the Louvre in Paris.[3]
French text of the Letter
"It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word."[4]
- Jean-François Champollion, Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques (Paris, 1822) – at French Wikisource
See also
- Decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs
- Translation of the letter by Rhys Bryant
References
- ISBN 0-06-019439-1
- ISBN 0-06-019439-1
- ISBN 978-0-7141-5021-5.
- ^ Jean-François Champollion, Letter to M. Dacier, September 27, 1822