The Rosetta Stone

The ancient Egyptians were a great mystery to scientists until they deciphered hieroglyphics, the writing of the ancient people. Egypt was mentioned in the Bible, but outsiders did not learn much about Egyptian history until a troop of French soldiers found a dark grey-pinkish granite stone near the Egyptian city Rosetta in 1799.

The Rosetta Stone was less than four feet tall and 2½ feet wide. It was inscribed with laws made in 196BC. The laws were written in three scripts. The first writing was ancient hieroglyphics, which was the script used by the Egyptians for important or religious documents. The second was the everyday writing used by Egyptian writers at that time. The third was the Greek lettering of the rulers of Egypt.

A French scholar named Jean Champollion translated the hieroglyphic writing in 1824. By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, Champollion could make educated guesses about what the others represented. Champollion concluded that hieroglyphics had originally been pictographs, but they stood for sounds in later times. Today the Rosetta Stone is used as a metaphor that refers to anything that is a key to figuring out a difficult problem.

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