The savants did make some progress with the stone itself. Jean-Joseph Marcel said the middle script was "cursive characters of the ancient Egyptian language", identical to others he had seen on papyrus scrolls. He and Louis Rémi Raige began comparing the text of this register with the Greek one, reasoning that the middle register would be more fruitful than the hieroglyphic text, most of which was missing. They guessed at the positions of proper names in the middle register, based on the position of those names in the Greek text, and managed to identify the p and t in the name of Ptolemy, but they made no further progress.
