Johan David Ã…kerblad
Johan David Åkerblad ( born May 6, 1763 in Stockholm, Sweden, † February 8, 1819 in Rome, Italy) was a Swedish diplomat and orientalist Paläograf.
Life
From 1778 Åkerblad studied classical and oriental languages at Uppsala University. In 1782 he defended against Professor Eric Michael Fant his thesis entitled De primis sub brisk Gustavo I specially Septentrionem initis fæderibus. From 1783, he worked for his language skills for the Royal Chancellery in Constantinople Opel. From 1784 to 1789 he worked in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa. After his return in 1789 he worked as a secretary and translator for diplomatic missions into Turkish. From 1791, he worked again in Constantinople Opel and undertook parallel the first research trips, including to Troy.
From 1800 he studied at the Georg -August- University Göttingen, Paris, The Hague and Rome. He focused on the dead languages of Egypt. So he collected material for a dictionary of the Coptic language.
Åkerblad was one of the first scientists to intense dealt with the Rosetta Stone. He worked from 1802 with a copy of the stone that he received from the French philologist Silvestre de Sacy. He focused on the Demotic and hieroglyphs. He managed to associate the name of Alexander and Ptolemy first. After two months he had been able to assign all the proper names in the demotic text. He used his knowledge of the Coptic language and discovered that the Demotic used a phonetic alphabet, which consisted of 29 letters.