Dr. Ilona Regulski

in the correct way as reading the names correctly.

This is refined by Champollion much later.

But yeah, I think the role of Thomas Young is not very clear always in the story, but he does go very far in reading large parts of the Rosetta Stone.

Yeah, so even Thomas Young himself was looking at other objects, mainly mummy wrappings and mummy labels, because those were kind of objects that were distributed in Europe since the 15th century.

So they were available.

Mummy wrappings because of the mummy unwrapping events that were going on at the time and people who attended a mummy wrapping event.

received a piece of the linen, preferably with some writing on it, and this was distributed across Europe and amongst scholars.

Papyri were also very important, so Thomas Young has a few friends who travel to Egypt and bring back papyri, which was allowed at the time.

And all these sources give him access to different kinds of texts.

And that was the same for scholars working in Europe.

It was mostly those small objects, mummy labels, mummy wrappings and papyri that they were also looking at, in addition to the Rosetta Stone.

And some of them are in the exhibition.

Yes, so Banks was actually very important and Jung is communicating with him.

Banks travelled through Egypt and discovers, for example, an obelisk in Philae that he later brings back and puts up in his garden, which will provide a missing link for both Thomas Jung and Champollion.

Very interesting is the correspondence between Thomas Young and Banks.

And at a certain point, Young writes to the father of Banks because he doesn't know where Banks is exactly in Egypt.

And it was obviously difficult to send letters to someone who's traveling in Egypt at the time.

So we display this letter in the exhibition.

And it's very nice because Thomas Young not only writes the letter, but also at the end gives a few spellings of hieroglyphs that he would like Banks to check in the temples of Egypt.

But he sends it to his father because he thinks maybe his father knows exactly where he is in the country and is also corresponding with him there.