Rosetta Stone

You've all seen hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics was used by the ancient Egyptians to write with. It's based on pictograms. However, for centuries, no one knew how to read it. Then, in 1799, some French soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the Rosetta Stone in Egypt. It was part of a wall in an old fort in the town of Rosetta. It was originally located in an ancient temple, but it was later moved to the fort. The Rosetta Stone had some writing on it. The writing was in three languages. One was ancient Greek, one was Demotic that's an ancient Egyptian language, and the other was hieroglyphics. All three languages contained the same information. It was a decree issued by some priest in 196 BC. It was about the new pharaoh of Egypt, Ptolemy V. The priest declared that Ptolemy had been chosen to rule, and they said that they would honor Ptolemy with a feast each year. The text on the Rosetta Stone became the key to understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Scholars started to compare the three writings. They understood the ancient Greek very well. The second writing, Demotic, was less well known. But some scholars came to understand it. Eventually, after much work, scholars started to decipher what the picture symbols and hieroglyphics meant. Two men were involved in most of the important translation work. The first was Thomas Young, an Englishman. In 1814, he made the first major discovery. He realized that the three texts contained the same information. He found about 80 words in the Demonic and Hieroglyphic texts that were similar to words in ancient Greek. For example, the name Ptolemy was Greek. It appears several times in all three texts. Young was able to figure out which symbols in Demonic and Hieroglyphics represented the name Ptolemy. The other scholar was a Frenchman, his name was Jean-Francois Champollion. In 1822, he produced an alphabet for Hieroglyphics based on the Rosetta Stone inscriptions. Later, he made a grammar and a dictionary for Hieroglyphics.