For a long time scholars puzzled over the strange Nile records, but made little progress in reading them. Then a young Frenchman named Champollion took up the problem, and after years of discouraging failure he began to make progress. He discovered the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra written in hieroglyphics. He was thus able to determine the sounds of twelve hieroglyphic signs which he proved to be alphabetic (see explanation of Fig. 76). Champollion was then  able to read several other royal names, and in 1822, in a famous letter to the French Academy, he announced his discovery and explained the steps he had taken.

    It was not until this point was reached that he was able to make use of the well-known Rosetta Stone, which was therefore not the first key employed by Champollion. But the Rosetta Stone (Fig. 207) then enabled him rapidly to increase his list of known hieroglyphic signs and to learn the meanings of words and the construction of sentences. When he died, in 1832, he had written a little grammar and prepared a small dictionary of hieroglyphic. There remains even now much to learn about the Egyptian language and writing, but Champollion’s marvelous achievement laid the foundations of a new science now called Egyptology, which has restored to the world a lost chapter of human history nearly three thousand years in length. Thus the monuments of the Nile have gained a voice and have told us their wonderful story of how man gained civilization.

    In a similar way the monuments discovered along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Asia have been deciphered and made to tell their story. They show us that, following the Egyptian,   [NEXT]
 

129. Cham-
pollion’s
successful de-
cipherment

130. Tran-
sition to Asia