"Very well," you said, "that means, of course, that the farmer went out
and cut a tree down." Most likely you had guessed correctly.

Next you took another page of hieroglyphics.

They told the story of a queen who had lived to be eighty-two years old.
Right in the middle of the text the same picture occurred. That was very
puzzling, to say the least. Queens do not go about cutting down trees.
They let other people do it for them. A young queen may saw wood for the
sake of exercise, but a queen of eighty-two stays at home with her cat
and her spinning wheel. Yet, the picture was there. The ancient priest
who drew it must have placed it there for a definite purpose.

What could he have meant?

That was the riddle which Champollion finally solved.

He discovered that the Egyptians were the first people to use what we
call "phonetic writing."

Like most other words which express a scientific idea, the word
"phonetic" is of Greek origin. It means the "science of the sound which
is made by our speech." You have seen the Greek word "phone," which
means the voice, before. It occurs in our word "telephone," the machine
which carries the voice to a distant point.

Ancient Egyptian was "phonetic" and it set man free from the narrow
limits of that sign language which in some primitive form had been used
ever since the cave-dweller began to scratch pictures of wild animals
upon the walls of his home.