Hieroglyphic writing
Hieroglyphic writingRight from the beginning the deciphering of the mysterious Egyptian writing fascinated everybody. In 1799 a certain Captain Bouchard of the French Army was supervising work on the fortifications of Fort St. Julian, situated a little more than four kilometers outside the town of Rosetta when hi workmen discovered a stone which was destined to achieve great fame in archaeological history. It was in fact the �Rosetta Stone� which led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs.
As a result of the fortunes of war this precious stone fell into the hands of the British who gave it a place of honor in the British Museum. On one face of the stone, a tablet of extremely hard black basalt, there is a long trilingual inscription; the three texts begin written one above other. The first of the inscriptions, 14 lines long, is written in hieroglyphs. The second, 32 lines long, is written in demotic, from the Greek word �demos� meaning people, which refers to a type of script used by ordinary people. The third inscription, 54 lines long, is in Greek and hence was comprehensible. This latter text, translated without difficulty, proved to be a priestly decree in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes which finishes with a formal instruction that �this decree, engraved on a tablet of hard stone, in three scripts, hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, shall be engraved in...
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