17. The stunning find and feat that opened the door to hieroglyphics
On August 21st, 1799, Pierre Bouchard, a French army captain who had accompanied Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, was supervising the restoration of an old fort near the town of Rosetta. When the French captain’s men uncovered a block of basalt measuring 3ft 9in high by 2ft 4in wide, and inscribed with three different types of writing, Bouchard immediately grasped its significance. He promptly alerted the team of French scholars who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt.
The discovery, which came to be known as the Rosetta Stone, contained Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Egyptian demotic scripts. Nobody knew how to read hieroglyphs or demotic, but scholars could read Greek, and the Greek text informed archaeologists that the stoned honored 2nd century BC king Ptolemy V. More importantly, the Greek text declared that the three scripts contained the identical message. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of ancient Egyptian writing, which had been dead for over a millennium. Several scholars made initial progress in cracking the hieroglyphs, until French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion conclusively cracked the code in 1822. From then on, the language, history, and culture of ancient Egypt was opened to scholars as never before.