Johan David Åkerblad | Swedish scholar | Britannica (original) (raw)

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decipherment of hieroglyphics

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  In hieroglyph
  …Sacy, a French scholar, and J.D. Akerblad, a Swedish diplomat, succeeded in identifying a number of proper names in the demotic text. Akerblad also correctly assigned phonetic values to a few of the signs. An Englishman, Thomas Young, correctly identified five of the hieroglyphics. The full deciphering of the stone…
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  In hieroglyphic writing: Discovery of the Rosetta Stone
  …were achieved by the Swede Johan David Åkerblad and by the English physicist Thomas Young, who mainly studied the demotic text, again beginning with the false hypothesis that the hieroglyphs were symbols. Young succeeded in proving that they were not symbols—at least that the proper names were not—and that the…
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