Champollion Junior was a baby when the French revolution broke out and
therefore he escaped serving in the armies of the General Buonaparte.

While his countrymen were marching from one glorious victory to another
(and back again as such Imperial armies are apt to do) Champollion
studied the language of the Copts, the native Christians of Egypt. At
the age of nineteen he was appointed a professor of History at one of
the smaller French universities and there he began his great work of
translating the pictures of the old Egyptian language.

For this purpose he used the famous black stone of Rosetta which
Broussard had discovered among the ruins near the mouth of the Nile.

The original stone was still in Egypt. Napoleon had been forced to
vacate the country in a hurry and he had left this curiosity behind.
When the English retook Alexandria in the year 1801 they found the stone
and carried it to London, where you may see it this very day in the
British Museum. The Inscriptions however had been copied and had been
taken to France, where they were used by Champollion.

The Greek text was quite clear. It contained the story of Ptolemy V and
his wife Cleopatra, the grandmother of that other Cleopatra about whom
Shakespeare wrote. The other two inscriptions, however, refused to
surrender their secrets.

One of them was in hieroglyphics, the name we give to the oldest known
Egyptian writing. The word Hieroglyphic is Greek and means "sacred
carving." It is a very good name for it fully describes the purpose and
nature of this script. The priests who had invented this art did not