Dr. Ilona Regulski

And there was a lot of discussion and it really spurred a lot of intellectual criticism, discussion as research should be.

There should be a lot of debate.

It was not that everybody immediately accepted, OK, this is now it and we have everything we need.

There was a lot of debate going on still.

Yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

And it spreads across the world also and to other countries.

So of course, Britain and France have a huge history in Egyptology.

Very soon, Germany joins this kind of early Egyptology.

And Egypt, of course, has always been there.

And then other countries.

And nowadays, Egyptology is taught from South America to Japan.

So yeah, it's a long process that is still going on.

I think very soon after the decipherment, it was really about...

Yeah, looking at objects again, finding more texts, also the awareness that texts have to be copied accurately in Egypt.

There was also immediately the debate about taking objects out of context.

Isn't it better to copy the inscriptions while they are in situ in the temples, in the tombs, rather than taking them out directly?

This is all something that comes out of this decipherment, in my feeling.

And again, British scholars played an enormously important role in that early phase of doing epigraphy in Egypt and established a very important school of epigraphy within the field of Egyptology.

So all these discussions multiply and are not only about understanding the text, but also about the preservation of Egyptian heritage.