When a soldier in Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta stone in a pile of rubble in Egypt in 1799, hopes soared that the linguistic puzzle of the ages – the meaning of the hieroglyphs – might finally be solved.
In “The Writing of the Gods: The Race To Decode the Rosetta Stone,” Edward Dolnick tells the fascinating story of one of the world’s most famous objects and the 20-year odyssey to unravel its mysteries.
The Rosetta stone was a 4-by-3-foot slab of granite on which were found three sets of inscriptions: Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Greek, and Coptic. If the writings were translations of the same information, then the latter scripts could provide an invaluable toehold into the Egyptian symbols.
