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55-404: The Tebtunis papyri are written in either Demotic Egyptian or Koine Greek and were found during a single expedition led by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt , two British papyrologists in the winter of 1899/1900 at the village of ancient Tebtunis (near modern Umm-el-Baragat), Egypt. The papyri can be divided into three groups based on their provenance: texts from the crocodile mummies,

110-468: A chill arose between them. For many years they kept details of their work away from each other. Some of Young's conclusions appeared in the famous article "Egypt" he wrote for the 1818 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica . When Champollion finally published a translation of the hieroglyphs and the key to the grammatical system in 1822, Young (and many others) praised his work. Nevertheless,

165-671: A cultural Christian Quaker. Hudson Gurney informed that before his marriage, Young had to join the Church of England , and was baptized later. Gurney stated that Young "retained a good deal of his old creed, and carried to his scriptural studies his habit of inquisition of languages and manners," rather than the habit of proselytism. Yet, the day before his death, Young participated in religious sacraments; as reported in David Brewster 's Edinburgh Journal of Science : "After some information concerning his affairs, and some instructions concerning

220-461: A fellow in 1794. He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice. His lectures were published in 1807 in the Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and contain a number of anticipations of later theories. In 1811, Young became physician to St George's Hospital , and in 1814 he served on a committee appointed to consider the dangers involved in

275-507: A higher status, as may be seen from its increasing use for literary and religious texts. By the end of the 3rd century BC, Koine Greek was more important, as it was the administrative language of the country; Demotic contracts lost most of their legal force unless there was a note in Greek of being registered with the authorities. From the beginning of Roman rule of Egypt , Demotic was progressively less used in public life. There are, however,

330-575: A liquid surface with a solid, and showed how from these two principles to deduce the phenomena of capillary action. In 1805, Pierre-Simon Laplace , the French philosopher, discovered the significance of meniscus radii with respect to capillary action. In 1830, Carl Friedrich Gauss , the German mathematician, unified the work of these two scientists to derive the Young–Laplace equation , the formula that describes

385-486: A method of tuning musical instruments. Later scholars and scientists have praised Young's work although they may know him only through achievements he made in their fields. His contemporary Sir John Herschel called him a "truly original genius". Albert Einstein praised him in the 1931 foreword to an edition of Isaac Newton 's Opticks . Other admirers include physicist Lord Rayleigh and Nobel Physics laureate Philip Anderson . Thomas Young's name has been adopted as

440-507: A number of literary texts written in Late Demotic ( c.  30 BC  – 452 AD), especially from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, though the quantity of all Demotic texts decreased rapidly towards the end of the second century. In contrast to the way Latin eliminated languages in the western part of the Empire, Greek did not replace Demotic entirely. After that, Demotic

495-552: A physician at 48 Welbeck Street , London (now recorded with a blue plaque ). Young published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation as a physician. In 1801, Young was appointed professor of natural philosophy (mainly physics ) at the Royal Institution . In two years, he delivered 91 lectures. In 1802, he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society , of which he had been elected

550-505: A ratio of the original length); that is, stress = E × strain, for a uniaxially loaded specimen. Young's modulus is independent of the component under investigation; that is, it is an inherent material property (the term modulus refers to an inherent material property). Young's Modulus allowed, for the first time, prediction of the strain in a component subject to a known stress (and vice versa). Prior to Young's contribution, engineers were required to apply Hooke's F = kx relationship to identify

605-555: A year later Young published an Account of the Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphic Literature and Egyptian Antiquities , with the aim of having his own work recognised as the basis for Champollion's system. Young had correctly found the sound value of six hieroglyphic signs, but had not deduced the grammar of the language. Young himself acknowledged that he was somewhat at a disadvantage because Champollion's knowledge of

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660-654: Is credited with establishing Christiaan Huygens' wave theory of light , in contrast to the corpuscular theory of Isaac Newton . Young's work was subsequently supported by the work of Augustin-Jean Fresnel . Young belonged to a Quaker family of Milverton, Somerset , where he was born in 1773, the eldest of ten children. By the age of fourteen, Young had learned Greek , Latin , French , Italian , Syriac , Samaritan Hebrew , Arabic , Biblical Aramaic , Persian , Turkish , and Ge'ez . Young began to study medicine in London at St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1792, moved to

715-581: Is much esteemed, it is too learned ... in short it is not understood." Young has also been called the founder of physiological optics. In 1793 he explained the mode in which the eye accommodates itself to vision at different distances as depending on change of the curvature of the crystalline lens ; in 1801 he was the first to describe astigmatism ; and in his lectures he presented the hypothesis, afterwards developed by Hermann von Helmholtz , (the Young–Helmholtz theory ), that colour perception depends on

770-934: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1822. A few years before his death he became interested in life insurance , and in 1827 he was chosen as one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences . In the same year he became a first class corresponding member, living abroad, of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands . In 1828, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences . In 1804, Young married Eliza Maxwell. They had no children. Young died in his 56th year in London on 10 May 1829, having suffered recurrent attacks of "asthma". His autopsy revealed atherosclerosis of

825-474: The University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1794, and a year later went to Göttingen , Lower Saxony, Germany, where he obtained the degree of doctor of medicine in 1796 from the University of Göttingen . In 1797 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge . In the same year he inherited the estate of his grand-uncle, Richard Brocklesby , which made him financially independent, and in 1799 he established himself as

880-416: The capillary pressure difference sustained across the interface between two static fluids. Young was the first to define the term "energy" in the modern sense. He also did work on the theory of tides paralleling that of Laplace and anticipating more well-known work by Airy . Young's equation describes the contact angle of a liquid drop on a plane solid surface as a function of the surface free energy,

935-519: The ripple tank he demonstrated the idea of interference in the context of water waves. With Young's interference experiment , the predecessor of the double-slit experiment , he demonstrated interference in the context of light as a wave. Young, speaking on 24 November 1803, to the Royal Society of London, began his now-classic description of the historic experiment: The experiments I am about to relate ... may be repeated with great ease, whenever

990-513: The "enchorial" text of the Rosetta Stone (using a list with 86 demotic words), and then studied the hieroglyphic alphabet but initially failed to recognise that the demotic and hieroglyphic texts were paraphrases and not simple translations. There was considerable rivalry between Young and Jean-François Champollion while both were working on hieroglyphic decipherment. At first they briefly cooperated in their work, but later, from around 1815,

1045-563: The Greek words, which could be readily translated, and fortifying that process by applying knowledge of Coptic (the Coptic language being descended from earlier forms of Egyptian represented in hieroglyphic writing). Egyptologists , linguists and papyrologists who specialize in the study of the Demotic stage of Egyptian script are known as Demotists . Thomas Young (scientist) Thomas Young FRS (13 June 1773 – 10 May 1829)

1100-496: The Mechanical Arts (1807) he gives Grimaldi credit for first observing the fringes in the shadow of an object placed in a beam of light. Within ten years, much of Young's work was reproduced and then extended by Augustin-Jean Fresnel . Young described the characterization of elasticity that came to be known as Young's modulus, denoted as E , in 1807, and further described it in his Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and

1155-400: The Mechanical Arts . However, the first use of the concept of Young's modulus in experiments was by Giordano Riccati in 1782—predating Young by 25 years. Furthermore, the idea can be traced to a paper by Leonhard Euler published in 1727, some 80 years before Thomas Young's 1807 paper. The Young's modulus relates the stress (pressure) in a body to its associated strain (change in length as

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1210-507: The Tebtunis papyri are referenced in both LSJ and BDAG lexicons. Demotic Egyptian Demotic (from Ancient Greek : δημοτικός dēmotikós , 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta . The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. By convention,

1265-469: The Temple of Tebtunis found 200 papyri. The papyri from the town are the most diverse, and they have provided us with literary fragments, including contracts, petitions, declarations, and tax receipts. Most of these papyri concern the priests of the crocodile god, Soknebtunis ( Sobek of Tebtunis ), the central deity worshiped in the temples. These documents reveal what life was like for Tebtunis priests when Egypt

1320-599: The aorta. His body was buried in the graveyard of St. Giles Church at Farnborough , in the county of Kent . Westminster Abbey houses a white marble tablet in memory of Young, bearing an epitaph by Hudson Gurney : Sacred to the memory of Thomas Young, M.D., Fellow and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society Member of the National Institute of France; a man alike eminent in almost every department of human learning. Patient of unintermitted labour, endowed with

1375-741: The decipherment. In the ensuing controversy, strongly motivated by the political tensions of that time, the British tended to champion Young, while the French mostly championed Champollion. Champollion did acknowledge some of Young's contribution, but rather sparingly. However, after 1826, when Champollion was a curator in the Louvre , he did offer Young access to demotic manuscripts. In England, while Sir George Lewis still doubted Champollion's achievement as late as 1862, others were more accepting. For example, Reginald Poole , and Sir Peter Le Page Renouf both defended Champollion. Young developed Young temperament ,

1430-499: The deformation (x) of a body subject to a known load (F), where the constant (k) is a function of both the geometry and material under consideration. Finding k required physical testing for any new component, as the F = kx relationship is a function of both geometry and material. Young's Modulus depends only on the material, not its geometry, thus allowing a revolution in engineering strategies. Young's problems in sometimes not expressing himself clearly were shown by his own definition of

1485-518: The faculty of intuitive perception, who, bringing an equal mastery to the most abstruse investigations of letters and of science, first established the undulatory theory of light, and first penetrated the obscurity which had veiled for ages the hieroglyphs of Egypt. Endeared to his friends by his domestic virtues, honoured by the World for his unrivalled acquirements, he died in the hopes of the Resurrection of

1540-516: The general introduction of gas for lighting into London. In 1816 he was secretary of a commission charged with ascertaining the precise length of the seconds pendulum (the length of a pendulum whose period is exactly 2 seconds), and in 1818 he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the HM Nautical Almanac Office . Young was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of

1595-462: The grammar and vocabulary of 400 languages. In a separate work in 1813, he introduced the term Indo-European languages , 165 years after the Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn proposed the grouping to which this term refers in 1647. Young made significant contributions to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian writing systems . He started his Egyptology work rather late, in 1813, when

1650-565: The hierographical papers in his hands, he said that, perfectly aware of his situation, he had taken the sacraments of the church on the day preceding. His religious sentiments were by himself stated to be liberal, though orthodox. He had extensively studied the Scriptures , of which the precepts were deeply impressed upon his mind from his earliest years; and he evidenced the faith which he professed; in an unbending course of usefulness and rectitude." In Young's own judgment, of his many achievements

1705-553: The interfacial free energy and the surface tension of the liquid. Young's equation was developed further some 60 years later by Dupré to account for thermodynamic effects, and this is known as the Young–Dupré equation. In physiology Young made an important contribution to haemodynamics in the Croonian lecture for 1808 on the "Functions of the Heart and Arteries," where he derived a formula for

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1760-544: The just. —Born at Milverton, in Somersetshire, 13 June 1773. Died in Park Square, London, 10 May 1829, in the 56th year of his age. Young was highly regarded by his friends and colleagues. He was said never to impose his knowledge, but if asked was able to answer even the most difficult scientific question with ease. Although very learned he had a reputation for sometimes having difficulty in communicating his knowledge. It

1815-887: The later part of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty , particularly found on steles from the Serapeum of Saqqara . It is generally dated between 650 and 400 BC, as most texts written in Early Demotic are dated to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty and the subsequent rule as a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire , which was known as the Twenty-seventh Dynasty . After the reunification of Egypt under Psamtik I , Demotic replaced Abnormal Hieratic in Upper Egypt , particularly during

1870-533: The modulus: "The modulus of the elasticity of any substance is a column of the same substance, capable of producing a pressure on its base which is to the weight causing a certain degree of compression as the length of the substance is to the diminution of its length." When this explanation was put to the Lords of the Admiralty, their clerk wrote to Young saying "Though science is much respected by their Lordships and your paper

1925-502: The most common signs in Demotic, making up between one third and one half of all signs in any given text; foreign words are also almost exclusively written with these signs. Later (Roman Period) texts used these signs even more frequently. The table below gives a list of such uniliteral signs along with their conventional transcription, their hieroglyphic origin, the Coptic letters derived from them, and notes on usage. The Rosetta Stone

1980-459: The most important was to establish the wave theory of light set out by Christiaan Huygens in his Treatise on Light (1690). To do so, he had to overcome the century-old view, expressed in the venerable Newton's Opticks , that light is a particle. Nevertheless, in the early 19th century Young put forth a number of theoretical reasons supporting the wave theory of light, and he developed two enduring demonstrations to support this viewpoint. With

2035-413: The presence in the retina of three kinds of nerve fibres. This foreshadowed the modern understanding of colour vision , in particular the finding that the eye does indeed have three colour receptors which are sensitive to different wavelength ranges. In 1804, Young developed the theory of capillary phenomena on the principle of surface tension . He also observed the constancy of the angle of contact of

2090-477: The reign of Amasis II , when it became the official administrative and legal script. During this period, Demotic was used only for administrative, legal, and commercial texts, while hieroglyphs and hieratic were reserved for religious texts and literature. Middle Demotic ( c.  400–30 BC ) is the stage of writing used during the Ptolemaic Kingdom . From the 4th century BC onward, Demotic held

2145-406: The relevant languages, such as Coptic, was much greater. Several scholars have suggested that Young's true contribution to Egyptology was his decipherment of the demotic script. He made the first major advances in this area; he also correctly identified demotic as being composed by both ideographic and phonetic signs. Subsequently, Young felt that Champollion was unwilling to share the credit for

2200-624: The sides of the card. He observed that placing another card in front or behind the narrow strip so as to prevent the light beam from striking one of its edges caused the fringes to disappear. This supported the contention that light is composed of waves . Young performed and analysed a number of experiments, including interference of light from reflection off nearby pairs of micrometre grooves, from reflection off thin films of soap and oil, and from Newton's rings . He also performed two important diffraction experiments using fibres and long narrow strips. In his Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and

2255-554: The state of affairs of every square meter of the area surrounding Kerkeosiris. The correspondence section essentially includes official letters that were addressed to Menches by his superiors and peers in the Ptolemaic bureaucracy. There also exists a separate group of texts made up of forty-five private documents from the first half of the 1st century BC. These texts were found in five crocodile mummies that had been buried next to each other. Grenfell and Hunt's first excavation in 1899 at

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2310-586: The sum of 12 plus the child's age. In an appendix to his 1796 Göttingen dissertation De corporis hvmani viribvs conservatricibvs there are four pages added proposing a universal phonetic alphabet (so as 'not to leave these pages blank'; lit.: "Ne vacuae starent hae paginae, libuit e praelectione ante disputationem habenda tabellam literarum vniuersalem raptim describere"). It includes 16 "pure" vowel symbols, nasal vowels, various consonants, and examples of these, drawn primarily from French and English. In his Encyclopædia Britannica article "Languages", Young compared

2365-402: The sun shines, and without any other apparatus than is at hand to every one. In his subsequent paper, titled Experiments and Calculations Relative to Physical Optics (1804), Young describes an experiment in which he placed a card measuring approximately 0.85 millimetres (0.033 in) in a beam of light from a single opening in a window and observed the fringes of colour in the shadow and to

2420-595: The town and from the temple of Soknebtunis, and the cartonnage of human mummies. A large portion of the Tebtunis crocodile mummies come from the archive of the komogrammateus or village scribe, of the nearby village, Kerkeosiris, at the end of the 2nd century BC. The Menches papers make up the biggest part of the Crocodile Papyri. These papers are divided into two groups, administrative documents and correspondence. The administrative documents are long reports that detail

2475-420: The village scribe, and the guards. Two papyri have been found that provide evidence regarding two officials, Apion and Kronion, who were in charge of the village record office in Tebtunis during the first half of the 1st century AD. This provides us with more information about certain events in the village of Tebtunis. These documents have been published in two volumes of Papyri from Tebtunis. The village record

2530-421: The wave speed of the pulse and his medical writings included An Introduction to Medical Literature , including a System of Practical Nosology (1813) and A Practical and Historical Treatise on Consumptive Diseases (1815). Young devised a rule of thumb for determining a child's drug dosage. Young's Rule states that the child dosage is equal to the adult dosage multiplied by the child's age in years, divided by

2585-452: The word "Demotic" is capitalized in order to distinguish it from demotic Greek . The Demotic script was referred to by the Egyptians as sš/sẖ n šꜥ.t 'document writing', which the second-century scholar Clement of Alexandria called ἐπιστολογραφική 'letter-writing', while early Western scholars, notably Thomas Young , formerly referred to it as " Enchorial Egyptian". The script

2640-408: The work was already in progress among other researchers. He began by using an Egyptian demotic alphabet of 29 letters built up by Johan David Åkerblad in 1802 (14 turned out to be incorrect). Åkerblad was correct in stressing the importance of the demotic text in trying to read the inscriptions, but he wrongly believed that demotic was entirely alphabetic. By 1814 Young had completely translated

2695-478: Was a British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision , light , solid mechanics , energy , physiology , language , musical harmony , and Egyptology . He was instrumental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs , specifically the Rosetta Stone . Young has been described as " The Last Man Who Knew Everything ". His work influenced that of William Herschel , Hermann von Helmholtz , James Clerk Maxwell , and Albert Einstein . Young

2750-572: Was directed by Apion from 7 AD to at least 25 AD and by 43 AD it was under the direction of Kronion, son of Apion, until 52 AD. The Tebtunis papyri frequently provide useful light on the usage of Koine Greek in the New Testament period. For example, the verb authentein , "to have authority", a hapax legomenon in the New Testament, is documented three times in relation to "bookkeepers having authority" in P.Fam.Tebt.15 (up to 114-15 AD). Texts from

2805-475: Was discovered in 1799. It is inscribed with a proclamation, written in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs , Demotic, and the Greek alphabet . There are 32 lines of Demotic, which is the middle of the three scripts on the stone. The Demotic was deciphered before the hieroglyphs, starting with the efforts of Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy . Scholars were eventually able to translate the hieroglyphs by comparing them with

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2860-478: Was only used for a few ostraca , subscriptions to Greek texts, mummy labels, and graffiti. The last dated example of the Demotic script is a graffito on the walls of the temple of Isis at Philae , dated to December 12, 452. The text simply reads "Petise, son of Petosiris"—who Petise was is unknown. Like its hieroglyphic predecessor script, Demotic possessed a set of "uniliteral" or "alphabetical" signs that could be used to represent individual phonemes . These are

2915-826: Was said by one of his contemporaries that, "His words were not those in familiar use, and the arrangement of his ideas seldom the same as those he conversed with. He was therefore worse calculated than any man I ever knew for the communication of knowledge." Though he sometimes dealt with religious topics of history in Egypt and wrote about the history of Christianity in Nubia , not much is known about Young's personal religious views. On George Peacock 's account, Young never spoke to him about morals, metaphysics or religion, though according to Young's wife, his attitudes showed that "his Quaker upbringing had strongly influenced his religious practices." Authoritative sources have described Young in terms of

2970-438: Was under Roman rule. Grenfell and Hunt's second excavation, at the southwest necropolis, unearthed fifty mummy coffins where used papyri had been recycled in the manufacture. The papyri from the cartonnage covering human mummies date from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Most of these documents can be traced back to Oxyrhynchus (modern-day El-Bahnasa), a small village to the north of Tebtunis. These texts are from village officials,

3025-607: Was used for more than a thousand years, and during that time a number of developmental stages occurred. It is written and read from right to left, while earlier hieroglyphs could be written from top to bottom, left to right, or right to left. Parts of the Demotic Greek Magical Papyri were written with a cypher script . Early Demotic (often referred to by the German term Frühdemotisch ) developed in Lower Egypt during

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