Dr. Ilona Regulski

So he said, would you mind passing on this letter?

Banks receives this letter while he's in Egypt and he does go and look for specifically those names and those cartouches that Jung would like to know about.

And yeah, and he finds them and he reads them and he copies them and he brings back these copies to England and so on and so forth.

Yeah, he's very instrumental to the story.

As I mentioned, the obelisk that comes back, the Kingston Lacey obelisk, provides a missing link because it gives the scholars the name of Cleopatra.

Yes, so important is that Banks copies the text on the obelisk and identifies the cartouche of Cleopatra, but doesn't analyze the cartouche.

There is a bit of discussion whether Champollion saw this copy or not.

So we know for sure that these copies of this obelisk were sent to Paris because they were in contact with some scholars in Paris.

Both Jung and Banks.

We don't know whether Champollion saw this particular annotated version of the copy.

But there's also at the same time pieces in France circulating also with the name of Cleopatra.

The important thing about that cartouche is that it shares four letters with the cartouche of Ptolemy.

And this is what Jung kind of misses and what Champollion uses to refine Jung's readings.

So these four letters in Cleopatra mean that Jung's readings of those hieroglyphs as syllables cannot be correct.

They have to be alphabetic letters in order to be used so easily in other names.

And this is what Champollion will publish in his 1822 letter.

Yes.

Well, yeah, there were many other objects that were used.

But I think the Rosetta Stone is more than providing a text.

It also accelerates the process of decipherment.