History of the shpylgoreih Web site

Foreword

When you read or hear the words hieroglyphs and translation together in a prase, a name usually immediately comes to mind, the one of Jean-François Champollion. Visitors, if you reached this website without knowing anything about Jean-François Champollion, you should first know this:

Born in 1790 in Figeac (Lot, France), Jean-François had a brother, Jacques-Joseph aka Champollion-Figeac, who was passionate about Egyptology. "In 1799, an officer of the Napoléon French army of Orient discovered in Rachid, a city in Egypt, better known since the Crusades under the name of Rosetta, a stone stele bearing in classical Egyptian noted in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, three versions of the same decree taken in 196 BC in favor of Ptolemy V Epiphanes by an assembly of Egyptian priests gathered in Memphis. This famous document, known as the Rosetta stone, finally provided a rational basis for deciphering hieroglyphs: the meaning of the Greek text would henceforth make it possible to check the validity of the hypotheses which would be made." (Pierre Grandet).

the Rosetta Stone

What else should you know? Jacques-Joseph explained to his brother, who was nine years old, this discovery which produced in the child an instantaneous passion for the enigma of the stone which included two texts out of three absolutely incomprehensible at that time (the third one was in greek). He would then have declared to his brother: "I will be the one who will discover the secret of hieroglyphs" (cf. Champollion. His life and his work. 1790-1832, Hermine Hartleben, Berlin, 1906). The rest of the story leaves you speechless: At the age of sixteen, he published a Comparative Study of Coptic and Egyptian, then began to learn Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, Copt, Chaldean, Amharic, Parsi, Persian, Sanskrit, Palhavi and Chinese at the Living School of Oriental Languages. In 1809, aged nineteen, Jean-François was appointed Professor of Ancient History and published a first theory on the Egyptian language. Then he continued his research in Paris where he moved in 1821, until September 14, 1822, date on which he wrote in his famous Letter to M. Dacier, Perpetual Secretary of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres: "I got it!".

Today, thanks to Jean-François Champollion, but also to Alan Henderson Gardiner, author in 1927 of the first Egyptian grammar, then to Raymond Faulkner, author of a famous dictionary in 1962, then to so many other scientists, as passionate as they are talented, thanks to them all we can read Egyptian hieroglyphs.

This website, created by an Enthousiast Egyptologist, intends to bring together the significant results of the main successful works carried out as of today in the field of computer-aided hieroglyphs translation (CAHT) which, by combining artificial intelligence and neural networks within Deep Learning, will probably soon allow the appearance of some pieces of software for our smartphones to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs texts on the fly.

We wish you a good visit.

Montpellier, September 14, 2022.

Didier DTL Morandi

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last update on 2025-01-25 15:47