Talk: Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt with Dr Ilona Regulski, Curator of Egyptian Written Culture at the British Museum

Talk: Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt with Dr Ilona Regulski, Curator of Egyptian Written Culture at the British Museum
Tickets to be released soon

In trying to reconstruct the history of writing, we often turn to sources from ancient Egypt. Every aspect of ancient Egyptian culture, its religious practice, monumental buildings, and bureaucratic minutiae, relied on a system of writing developed around 3250 BCE. The spoken language was used until the 15th century CE, making it one of history’s longest-surviving recorded languages. But following the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, the ancient scripts slowly fell out of use in Egypt and a new alphabet to record the spoken language became more widespread. Roman and Greek authors, who could not read hieroglyphs, believed them to be symbolic rather than linked to the sound of spoken language, a belief that went unquestioned and effectively obstructed access Egypt’s written sources for centuries. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 and its subsequent decipherment provided the decisive key to unlocking the meaning of the mysterious characters.

The talk will chart the race to decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and explore the inscribed objects that helped scholars unlock one of the world’s oldest civilisations. The Rosetta Stone will be discussed alongside some of its ancient copies and the very inscriptions scholars studied in their quest to understand ancient Egypt. The talk will illustrate how an increased understanding of these written sources has unlocked one of the world’s oldest civilisations and helped us to understand how the ancients viewed and experienced the world.