Dr. Ilona Regulski

And he tries to read the royal names.

Again, it goes back to the royal names in the cartouches.

the names of Ptolemy in the first place.

He reads the name of Ptolemy correctly but his analysis of the individual signs are slightly wrong because he reads them as syllables.

But it's a very good step in the right direction and so what Thomas Young does is basically he looks at the Greek text.

Thomas Young was also very well trained in Greek and Latin, so very classically trained.

And he looks at the position of words in the Greek text that occur many times, like the title Basileos, the word for temple.

And he tries to find in more or less the same place in the demotic text, the same cluster of signs.

And he manages to identify many words like this.

Even though he can't perhaps read the individual signs, he is able to give a first translation of some of the sentences in the Rosetta Stone.

And that's what he publishes.

First, anonymously.

This is the problem in the later debate of who was the first.

And that is something that, again, encourages other scholars to continue working and to refine themselves.

I think so.

There are scholars who even say that Thomas Young is the decipherer of the demotic.

I don't think you can say that because it is really the same language.

It's the same writing system.

So it really goes together.

And there were a few key understandings that Thomas Young at least didn't publish in this way.