Dr. Ilona Regulski

Again, we have a lot of correspondence between some of those scholars and Champollion, who tries to get a copy of the Rosetta Stone.

And he complains that his copy is not good enough.

And

He wants a new copy.

And then at a certain point, he writes to the Royal Society here in England, asking for a new cast of the stone and so on and so forth.

So there was a lot of talk about getting good copies of the Rosetta Stone.

Yes, so he's a very different kind of person, very different from Champollion in character and in approach.

He is what we call a polymath, was a physician, a mathematician, a scientist.

He had contributed immensely to the theory of light.

And then in his leisurely hours, did a bit of Egyptology.

Later in his life, he was older than Champollion when he started working on the Rosetta Stone, which also makes a difference, I guess.

And for him, it was kind of like an experiment, a scientific experiment to decipher hieroglyphs, more like a mathematical game almost.

Whereas Champollion really saw the decipherment as a way to enter ancient Egypt and to understand the culture.

Whereas for Champollion, it was a venture in itself, an intellectual challenge.

Yes, so in 1818, 1819, Thomas Young starts to publish his first discoveries, which worry Champollion back in France.

And he's like, oh, I have to hurry and I have to work harder.

Because there is this English scholar.

This is really the first time when they get like improper contact with each other or hear from each other.

And for Thomas Young, he works a lot on the demotic.

So the middle part of the Rosetta Stone.