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The Key to Ancient Egypt

For more than 1,400 years, the intricate system of writing used by the ancient Egyptians, known as hieroglyphs, was a complete mystery. The knowledge required to read the script was lost after the last known inscription was made in the 4th century AD. Throughout the centuries, numerous scholars attempted to decipher the elegant symbols, but progress was minimal. A major obstacle was the widespread but incorrect assumption that all hieroglyphs were purely symbolic or ideographic, representing whole ideas rather than phonetic sounds.

The breakthrough came in 1799, when French soldiers in Egypt discovered a large, inscribed stone slab near the town of Rosetta. This artifact, now famously known as the Rosetta Stone, contained a decree issued in 196 BC. Crucially, the same text was inscribed in three different scripts: the enigmatic hieroglyphs, a later cursive Egyptian script called Demotic, and ancient Greek. Since scholars of the time could read ancient Greek, the stone provided a parallel text, a direct key for translation. It was the crucial tool that scholars had been missing.

The final decipherment was the work of the brilliant French linguist Jean-François Champollion in the 1820s. He built on the work of others who had identified proper names in the Greek text. Champollion correctly hypothesized that hieroglyphs were a hybrid system, a complex mixture of phonetic, syllabic, and ideographic signs. By meticulously comparing the Greek names, like Ptolemy, with the corresponding symbols enclosed in oval rings (cartouches) in the hieroglyphic text, he successfully cracked the code, unlocking the language, history, and culture of ancient Egypt.