Beyond the European Alphabets: Ahmed Kamal, Champollion, and Moncef Chelli

Decipherment bicentenary exhibitions helped to foreground the archival evidence and its gaps. Egyptologists have emphasized also how a detailed understanding of the ancient language and its scripts took many decades beyond 1822, while researchers in multiple disciplines have analyzed the bias against non-European scripts in European-language philology and linguistics. Research starting from Arabic language and script, as Ahmed Kamal sought, would support more accurate description and appreciation of the ancient script that spoke clearly first in modern times to Champollion.