Yeah. The Copts are the descendants of the Ancient Egyptians. Their Christian Church ritule is in a Coptic, a form of later Ancient Egyptian. Using it and the Rosettta Stone, linguistis and Egyptiologists were able to decipher hieroglphs. Ancient Egyptian was a separate and distinct language from Arabic and although they are related, the relationship is very distant - like between English and Tocharian - an ancient extinct language of Central Asia.
So the Copts are the real Egyptians and the Islamic Egyptians are descendents of Arabs who speak Arabic or Arabicized Ancient Egyptians.
The Rosetta Stone
http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html
How did Champollion decipher hieroglyphs?
Champollion could read both Greek and coptic.
He was able to figure out what the seven demotic signs in coptic were. By looking at how these signs were used in coptic he was able to work out what they stood for. Then he began tracing these demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs.
By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he could make educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs stood for.
[#2]
The Story of the Rosetta Stone, “Finding a Lost Language”
from “Ancient Peoples: A Hypertext View”
draft by Richard A. Strachan and Kathleen A. Roetzel (1997)
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/egypt/hieroglyphics/rosettastone.html
The first to make any sense of the Demotic script on the Rosetta Stone was a French scholar named Silvestre deSacy. deSacy was an important and skilled French linguist. He identified the symbols which comprised the word ‘Ptolemy’ and ‘Alexander’ thus, establishing a relationship between the symbols and sounds. Johann Akerblad who history records as a Swedish diplomat, looked at the Rosetta Stone with an additional knowledge of Coptic. Coptic was the language used by the Coptic church of Egypt, an early Christian group who preserved the language which was used as early as the 4th century. Coptic was written with the Greek alphabet but utilizes seven additional symbols from the Demotic script. Akerblad’s knowledge of Coptic allowed him to identify the words for ‘love,’ ‘temple’ and ‘Greek’ thus, making it clear that the Demotic script was not only a phonetic script but it was also translatable.
[#3]
Text of the Rosetta Stone
http://pw1.netcom.com/~qkstart/rosetta.html
Few liberals that I have met have any understanding of history generally.
They are stunned to find out that the early Christian church also existed in Egypt. Or that the arab muslims wiped out that culture.
Same for other areas like Lebanon, Armenia, Turkey...
sad.