Johan David Åkerblad

Who was Johan David Åkerblad?

Johan David Åkerblad was a Swedish diplomat and orientalist, a student of Silvestre de Sacy. Sacy's investigation of the Rosetta Stone did not give any result and Åkerblad took on his work in 1802 and managed to identify all proper names in the demotic text in just two months. He could also read words like "Greek", "temple" and "Egyptian" and found out the correct sound value from 14 of the 29 signs, but he wrongly believed the demotic hieroglyphs to be entirely alphabetic. One of his strategies of comparing the demotic to Coptic later became a key in Champollion's eventual decipherment of the hieroglyphic script and the Ancient Egyptian language.