Civilization / Humanities & Culture

Hieroglyphs Deciphered

Champollion cracks Egyptian hieroglyphs (1822) with the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, and the Coptic language.

The stone carries one decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek. Thomas Young had identified royal names; Champollion showed that the signs write both sounds and ideas and linked them to Coptic, opening about 3,000 years of Egyptian history to reading.