In reality, the hieroglyphs only contained six. Of the phonetic values that he assigned to hieroglyphs, five were correct (p, t, i, n, and f). (Budge 54) In 1814, he revealed the way in which the hieroglyphic signs were to be read by studying the direction in which the birds and other animals were all facing. He also was able to correctly identify some single-consonant hieroglyphic signs. Young's main contribution to Egyptology was published in the 1824 Encyclopedia Britannica, which described his findings. Another man who devoted many years of his life to studying the stone was Jean-Francois Champollion. After many years of perseverance, Champollion finally translated the stone in 1822.
He accomplished this feat by first recognizing that hieroglyphs were not symbols, but instead were associated with phonetics, as Thomas Young had proved. (Andrews 166) His first major breakthrough in his studies was in 1808, when he resolved those fifteen signs of the demotic script related with alphabetic letters from the Coptic language. From this he concluded that Coptic language must be based on the remnants of the last of the ancient Egyptian language, and written with the Greek alphabet, which is why it was readable to Champollion and other scholars researching the stone. Also, that the hieroglyphic text was a translation of the Greek, not the reverse, as had been previously believed. By 1818, Champollion had successfully concluded that though some signs were basically ideograms, many of the glyphs had phonetic value, meaning the ancient Egyptian script was at least partially alphabetic. (Giblin 83) He came to this conclusion after referring back to three other different forms of Egyptian writing and also using Coptic as a reference. Recognizing the name 'Ptolemy' and 'Cleopatra' in the Greek and demotic sections of the stone allowed him to identify those same names in hieroglyphics. Still wondering, he didn't think that hieroglyphs were regularly used in a phonetic way to write in ancient Egyptian language, since the deciphered names were foreign to Egypt (they were Greek and Roman).
