By 14, he had taught himself multiple languages and later explained how humans see colour. But his genius mind helped unlock ancient Egypt's lost code

For centuries, the meaning of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs had been lost, leaving scholars with monuments and inscriptions they could see but no longer understand. That began to change after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, a stone carrying the same decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Ancient Greek. While the Greek text provided an important clue, it took years of study by several scholars to work out how the ancient Egyptian writing system actually worked. One of the men who made an important early breakthrough was Thomas Young, an English scholar whose interests ranged from medicine and physics to languages and the way humans see colour.

Long before Young turned his attention to the Rosetta Stone, he had already shown an unusual ability to learn. Born in Somerset in 1773 as the youngest of 10 children, he developed an interest in languages and science at a very young age.

By the time he was 14, Young was acquainted with Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. His interests went far beyond languages, though. During his lifetime, he worked in medicine, physics, mathematics, astronomy and the study of vision.


He eventually studied medicine in London, Edinburgh and Göttingen before establishing himself as a physician in London. He also became a Fellow of the Royal Society and later held the position of professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution.

Young's scientific work included research into the human eye and colour vision, adding to his reputation as a scholar who could move between very different subjects.

But it was his interest in ancient languages that would bring him into one of the most famous intellectual puzzles of the 19th century.

The Rosetta Stone changed the search

The Rosetta Stone was found in July 1799 near Rashid, a town in Egypt's Nile Delta known to the French as Rosetta. French soldiers involved in Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign discovered the broken stone while working on the foundations of a fort.

Dating to 196 BC, the stone contains a decree issued during the reign of Ptolemy V. Its importance came from the fact that the decree appeared in three forms of writing — Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic and Ancient Greek.

Greek was still understood by scholars, while knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs had disappeared many centuries earlier. Comparing the three versions gave scholars a rare opportunity to use a known language to investigate the two unfamiliar scripts.

The British Museum says the surviving Stone has 14 lines of hieroglyphs, 32 lines of Demotic and 54 lines of Ancient Greek.

Young begins to decipher the hieroglyphs

Young turned his attention seriously to Egyptian writing in the 1810s. While studying the Rosetta Stone, he noticed similarities between Demotic and hieroglyphs and began looking more closely at the oval-shaped cartouches found in the hieroglyphic section.

The Greek inscription gave him an important clue. Young reasoned that several of the cartouches must contain the name of Ptolemy, the Greek ruler of Egypt mentioned in the decree.

He then broke down the symbols inside the cartouches and identified signs that represented sounds in the name.

By 1819, Young had published his findings in a supplement on Egypt for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His work included proposed phonetic values for 13 hieroglyphs, translations of hundreds of Demotic and hieroglyphic words and a proposed alphabet for Demotic.

It was a significant step in a problem that had remained unsolved for centuries.

Champollion takes the work further

Young was not the only scholar trying to decipher Egyptian writing. French linguist Jean-François Champollion was pursuing the same mystery and eventually took the breakthrough much further.

On September 27, 1822, Champollion presented his findings at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris. Young was in the city and attended the presentation, sitting beside Champollion as the French scholar announced his discovery.

Champollion established that hieroglyphs could represent sounds and used his knowledge of Coptic, which developed from ancient Egyptian, to understand the language behind the writing.

The relationship between the two scholars later became complicated. Young believed his contribution had not received enough credit and wrote to his friend Hudson Gurney:

“[Champollion] has been wonderfully successful…How far he will acknowledge everything which he has either borrowed or might have borrowed from me I am not quite confident…”

Champollion continued developing his system, while Young eventually returned to other areas of research and spent his later years working more extensively on Demotic.

The legacy of Thomas Young

Young died in London in 1829, aged 55, leaving behind work that covered an unusually wide range of subjects. His research into colour vision, medicine, physics and ancient writing made him one of the notable polymaths of his time.

His role in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs was only one part of his career, but it remains one of the most fascinating. Young helped establish that the symbols could carry phonetic information and made important progress in identifying the name of Ptolemy.

Champollion would ultimately provide the fuller breakthrough that allowed scholars to read Egyptian inscriptions with far greater confidence. Still, Young's early work helped move the decipherment forward.

The Rosetta Stone, meanwhile, remains one of the world's best-known archaeological objects. Found more than 2,200 years after the decree was carved, it became the crucial link between a readable ancient language and two scripts whose meanings had been forgotten.