ISSN: 2534-5192 (electronic) – 2681-8566 (print)

ISBN: 978-2-487055-04-9 e-ISBN: 978-2-487055-05-6 Download (NOT THERE YET)

The Rosetta Stone Squandered: Decipherment's Twelve-Year Gap and the Fate of J.D. Åkerblad Daniel Harbour  Download (2.31 MB) Abstract. Just three years after its much feted discovery, the Rosetta Stone fell into a period of sustained neglect. Two partial decipherments had been made of its demotic text but its hieroglyphic inscription had barely been investigated. I examine the reasons behind this fall from grace and argue that J.D. Åkerblad, the author of the more penetrating demotic study, could have made significant inroads into the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. His results would have presaged by twenty years results of the eventual decipherer of the script, Jean-François Champollion. This would have changed, with untellable consequences, the intellectual space in which Champollion and his main rival, Thomas Young, worked. The study’s conclusions highlight the centrality of decipherment to philography/grapholinguistics and the importance, both to research and to researchers, of properly functioning academic institutions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.36824/2022-graf-harb How to cite How to cite in BIB Daniel Harbour (2022), “The Rosetta Stone Squandered: Decipherment's Twelve-Year Gap and the Fate of J.D. Åkerblad,” in Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2022 (Yannis Haralambous, Ed.), Grapholinguistics and Its Applications, Vol. 9, Brest: Fluxus Editions, 193–217. @INPROCEEDINGS{gla9-harb, AUTHOR = {Daniel Harbour}, EDITOR = {Haralambous, Yannis}, TITLE = {{The Rosetta Stone Squandered: Decipherment's Twelve-Year Gap and the Fate of J.D. Åkerblad}}, BOOKTITLE = {{Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2022}}, SERIES = {{Grapholinguistics and Its Applications}}, VOLUME = {9}, PUBLISHER = {Fluxus Editions}, ADDRESS = {Brest}, YEAR = {2022}, PAGES = {193--217}, DOI = {https://doi.org/10.36824/2022-graf-harb}, }