want the common people to become too familiar with the deep mysteries of
preserving speech. They made writing a sacred business.

They surrounded it with much mystery and decreed that the carving of
hieroglyphics be regarded as a sacred art and forbade the people to
practice it for such a common purpose as business or commerce.

They could enforce this rule with success so long as the country was
inhabited by simple farmers who lived at home and grew everything they
needed upon their own fields. But gradually Egypt became a land of
traders and these traders needed a means of communication beyond the
spoken word. So they boldly took the little figures of the priests and
simplified them for their own purposes. Thereafter they wrote their
business letters in the new script which became known as the "popular
language" and which we call by its Greek name, the "Demotic language."

The Rosetta stone carried both the sacred and the popular translations
of the Greek text and upon these two Champollion centered his attack. He
collected every piece of Egyptian script which he could get and together
with the Rosetta stone he compared and studied them until after twenty
years of patient drudgery he understood the meaning of fourteen
little figures.

That means that he spent more than a whole year to decipher each single
picture.

Finally he went to Egypt and in the year 1823 he printed the first
scientific book upon the subject of the ancient hieroglyphics.

Nine years later he died from overwork, as a true martyr to the great