The Word Nobody Could Read

For centuries, Egyptian hieroglyphs were a mute language. Nobody in the world knew how to read them.

The key turned up in 1799, when French soldiers in Egypt found a granite slab with the same text carved three times: in hieroglyphs, in Egyptian demotic and in ancient Greek. It was the Rosetta Stone. Since Greek could be understood, it worked as the translation.

The work of deciphering took more than two decades. In 1822, the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion showed that hieroglyphs were not only symbolic drawings, but also signs standing for sounds. With that idea, an entire civilisation spoke again.

Source: The British Museum