were still almost perfect, but most of the hieroglyphic text
had been broken away with the top of the tablet; portions of about half
of the lines remained, but no single line was complete. In 1802 J. D.
Akerblad, a Swedish orientalist attached to the embassy in Paris,
identified the proper names of persons which occurred in the demotic
text, being guided to them by the position of their equivalents in the
Greek. These names, all of them foreign, were written in an alphabet of
a limited number of characters, and were therefore analysed with
comparative ease.

The hieroglyphic text upon the Rosetta stone was too fragmentary to
furnish of itself the key to the decipherment. But the study of this
with the other scanty monuments and imperfect copies of inscriptions
that were available enabled the celebrated physicist Thomas Young
(1773-1829) to make a beginning. In an article completed in 1819 and
printed (over the initials I. J.) in the supplement to the 4th, 5th and
6th editions of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (vol. iv., 1824), he
published a brief account of Egyptian research, with five plates
containing the "rudiments of an Egyptian vocabulary." It appears that
Young could place the hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek texts of the
Rosetta stone very correctly parallel; but he could not accurately break
up the Egyptian sentences into words, much less could he attribute to
the words their proper sounds. Yet he recognized correctly the names of
Apis and Re, with many groups for words such as "assembly," "good,"
"name," and important signs such as those which distinguish feminine
words. In a bad copy of another monument he rightly guessed the royal
name of Berenice in its cartouche by the side of that of Ptolemy, which
was already known from its occurrence on the Rosetta stone. He
considered that these names must be written in phonetic characters in
the hieroglyphic as in demotic, but he failed to analyse them correctly.
It was clear, however, that with more materials and perseverance such
efforts after decipherment must eventually succeed.

Meanwhile J. F. Champollion "le Jeune" (see CHAMPOLLION; and Hartleben,
_Champollion, sein Leben und sein Werk_, Berlin, 1906) had devoted his
energies whole-heartedly since 1802, when he was only eleven years old,
to preparing himself for the solution of the Egyptian problem, by wide
linguistic and historical studies, and above all by familiarizing
himself with every scrap of Egyptian w