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…
Read MoreOn 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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