1For fourteen long centuries, nobody anywhere on earth could read the mysterious hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt.
2The meaning of the picture signs had died together with the last priests of the great temples.
3Then, in seventeen ninety-nine, French soldiers digging a fort near Rosetta found a broken black stone.
4It carried the same official decree repeated three times in three completely different ancient scripts.
5One of these scripts was Greek, a language which scholars of the time could still read fluently.
6A brilliant young Frenchman named Champollion devoted his entire life to solving the ancient puzzle.
7He noticed that royal names always appeared inside oval rings which the Egyptians called cartouches.
8By carefully comparing those names, he proved that the picture signs actually stood for spoken sounds.
9When he finally cracked the code after years of work, he reportedly fainted from sheer exhaustion.
10His remarkable breakthrough turned silent stone monuments into living voices calling from the distant past.
11Thanks to that single stone, we can now read letters, laws, and love poems written in ancient Egypt.