Hieroglyphs: the Rosetta Stone and Recovery of Ancient Egypt

In 394 CE, a priest at a temple on the Nile carved a hieroglyphic inscription that is the last dated example anyone has found. For the next fourteen centuries, hundreds of thousands of signs covering Egypt's temples, tombs, and monuments went unread, while European scholarship built a confident, elaborate, and almost entirely wrong theory of what they meant. This book tells the two stories that have to be told together: how a script used continuously for three and a half thousand years fell silent, and how it was made to speak again in barely twenty years, after a French army officer found a broken decree stone built into a fort wall in 1799, carrying the same text in three scripts, one of which was still legible.It follows the recovery through the men who did the work, chiefly Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, whose competing claims to priority have been argued for two hundred years, and sets out plainly what each established and when, rather than adjudicating between them. It explains, in worked detail, how the writing system actually functions, why a script of some seven hundred signs is neither an alphabet nor a picture-code, and why Coptic, a language that had never stopped being spoken in Egypt, supplied the key. It also follows the stone itself, from that fort wall to the British Museum, and gives a fair account of the ongoing dispute over where it now belongs.An account of how a script died and was read again, and of what became knowable about a civilization once it was.