On September 27, 1822, Jean-François Champollion, the brilliant and tireless French philologist, stood before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and announced what scholars had dreamed of for centuries: the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script had at last been deciphered. His declaration, brief and…
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On July 15, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s military campaign in Egypt, a French soldier stumbled across a huge black stone with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles east of Alexandria. Made of black basalt with the writing of an ancient…
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