Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 January 24b

Jean-François Champollion

The decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts was accomplished in the early nineteenth century by several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion (pictured) and Thomas Young. Egyptian writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Afterwards, it was believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas, rather than phonetic, representing sounds. The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, bore a parallel text in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, but deciphering the Egyptian text through its Greek translation proved difficult. Young, building on the work of Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Johan David Åkerblad, identified several phonetic signs in demotic. In the early 1820s Champollion realised the hieroglyphic script had both phonetic and ideographic elements. He identified the meanings of most phonetic hieroglyphs and established much of the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Egyptian. (Full article...)

Coronaviruses viewed under an electron microscope

• In China,
  infects
  more than nine hundred people, killing at least twenty-six.
• his cabinet
  .
• Scientists announce that presolar stardust grains in the Murchison meteorite formed five to seven billion years ago, and are the oldest solid material found on Earth to date.

January 24

James W. Marshall

• 914 – The Fatimid Caliphate began their first invasion of Egypt, against the Abbasids, which eventually ended in failure.
• California Gold Rush
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• 1978 – The Soviet nuclear-powered satellite Kosmos 954 burned up during atmospheric reentry, scattering radioactive debris across Canada's Northwest Territories.
• 1990 – Japan launched the Hiten spacecraft, the first lunar probe launched by a country other than the Soviet Union or the United States.
• 2011 – A North Caucasian jihadist carried out a suicide bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, killing 37 people.

Richard de Bury (b. 1287) · Signe Rink (b. 1836) · Elie Hobeika (d. 2002)