Note 152 — Chapter III
Reading edition
Dr. Young, not Champollion, was the first to discover the true method of deciphering the hieroglyphics by determining that “certain characters in the Proper Names, whatever may have been their original import, were employed to represent sounds.” This he published, in 1819, in the “Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica.” Two years later, in 1821, M. Champollion published at Grenoble a work in which he still asserted “that hieroglyphics are not phonetic,” and “that hieroglyphical symbols are the signs of things, and not the signs of sounds.”