A. Kirsher had suggested, in the seventeenth century, that the liturgical language of the native Christian confession in Egypt, Coptic, was the last stage of the Ancient Egyptian language.
The Abbot Barthélémy had already suggested in the eighteen century that the
cartouches
enclosed royal names. Thus, after the Rosetta stone had been found,
Akerblad and Young were able to read some Greek and Roman royal names.
Champollion, using his knowledge of the Coptic language, proved
that the phonetic system wasn't only used for foreign names, thus
getting the clue that allowed him to translate quite accurately many
texts during the ten years that followed his discovery.
Seeing the name
, he thought that
was a sign for the sun, in Coptic, ``Ra'';
he knew from the Rosetta stone that
was associated with the words ``to give birth'',
``mose'', so he thought it was the consonant ``m'', and he knew, from
Ptolemaic names, that
was an ``s''.
So he got : ``ra-m-s-s'', Ramesses. The same system, on the cartouche
gave him the name ``Tuthmosis''. Actually, he was
wrong when he thought of
as an ``m'', because it is a biliteral sign for
``ms''. But this wasn't a hindrance and his system allowed him to go
on. As a matter of fact, in ptolemaic times, the number of signs that
could be used as uniliteral signs was so great that it was quite
natural to think of the system as composed of uniliteral consonantic
signs, ideograms, and determinatives.