Summary Of The Paper 'Egypt Under The Pharaohs'

n 1817 François read a review of his paper titled ‘Egypt under the Pharaohs’ which was published by an anonymous Englishman which was really positive telling François that he should return and review his old research. It was speculated that this was written by Young but the allegations appeared fairly unlikely as Young was highly critical of François’ work. Not long after François began to look for employment at the University in Grenoble again which succeeded. This was not necessarily positive as teaching consumed most of his and he could not do much research or go on local archeological finds. In the midst of all of this happening Young was still working on the Rosetta stone, in 1819 he published a major article in The Encyclopedia Britannica about ‘Egypt’ …show more content…
Young, in 1815, had been the first to suggest that the demotic was not alphabetic but rather a mixture of "replications of hieroglyphics" and "alphabetic" signs. François on the other hand correctly considered the scripts to match almost entirely in different way by being able to express the same script in different formal fashions. That same year he realized that the Rosetta stone uses more than one style of writing he noticed that it was a mixture of ideograms and phonetic signs, just as Young had argued for Demotic. He argued that if the script was completely ideographic it would require more separate signs as Greek text. There was much less this implied that the ideographic and the phonetic signs were mixed. This helped François to disengage from the notion that different scripts had to be either completely ideographic or completely phonetic and that they couldn’t mix. He realized that the sign mixture was more complex than it seemed. This gave François a slight lead over