Published on March 29, 2026
It must have been a dazzling sight to behold when the waters of the Nile flooded the lowlands of Ancient Egypt. The ground disappearing, the ditches filling in, villages emerging as if tiny islands, and the swelling of the river setting the rhythm of time. There are some 1,000 kilometers between Aswan and the Mediterranean, and covering three-quarters of this distance, Upper Egypt is a furrow hollowed into the desert. The rest is made up of the delta, so called because the Greeks recognized in its triangular shape the fourth letter of their alphabet.
Around 5,200 years ago, some of the peoples living on the banks of the Nile among the papyrus plants and palm trees must have felt the need to reflect everything around them in writing and chiselled out the first hieroglyphs in history on various pieces of stone. The oldest we know of date from 3,250 BC, and together with cuneiform script, these are the earliest forms of human writing. How many thousands of years must human beings have been interacting without feeling the need to write anything down until then?
London, in early 2023, finds itself embroiled in the furore surrounding the appointment of yet another Prime Minister and the upcoming coronation of Charles III at Westminster Abbey. However, one would be hard-pressed to hear a pin drop in any of the galleries of the British Museum, which showcases “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt,” featuring 240 objects from national and international collections in celebration of the two-hundred-year anniversary of the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone.
The exhibition, dimly lit with its black walls painted over with silver hieroglyphics, accentuates the sensation of being inside a pyramid. At its conclusion, in the final room, scenes of the banks of the Nile are projected in the round—its feluccas and palm trees, its temples and obelisks, its pyramids and birds in flight, with the vast sea of the desert stretching behind them.
The display cases of the exhibition contain fascinating objects such as Champollion’s and Thomas Young’s personal notes, four canopic vases preserving the organs of the deceased, the bandage of the Mummy of Aberuait, and the 3,000-year-old Book of the Dead of Queen Nedjmet. Papyrus grew abundantly on the fertile, marshy banks of the Nile—a plant, whose name derives from the Greek word meaning “royal,” with stalks used for shipbuilding and fibers serving to make ropes, mats, sails, baskets, and sandals, while its central pith created the papyrus on which to write.
Nevertheless, the centerpiece of the exhibition is the Rosetta Stone, spot-lit as if by a magic beam. This fragment of an ancient stele is synonymous with the hieroglyphs that covered statues, monuments, and papyri in Ancient Egypt. Its pictorial-style script was closely linked to Egyptian culture but was never used elsewhere, although it inspired the Proto-Sinaitic script, which might be a distant ancestor of the modern alphabet.
The first pages of Jean-François Champollion’s book, “Egyptian Pantheon,” open with a description of Amun—a god in human form usually seated on a throne. His skin is blue, and his beard is styled as the black appendage characteristic of male divinities. In his left hand, he holds a sceptre crowned with a bird’s head, and in his right hand, he carries a cross surmounted or handle-shaped loop—the symbol of divine life. He wears a tall double-plumed royal headdress, and a long blue ribbon cascades down his back. This aesthetic raises the question: if the 19th century was one of revivals in style, why was the refined taste of Pharaonic Egypt not also taken as inspiration for the decoration of future palaces, clothing, furniture, or tableware?
The story of the Rosetta Stone has an inexplicable force. In December 1797, Tipu Sultan of Mysore in India asked Napoleon for help in quelling the growing threat of British power in India. It was then that, in the margins of a book about the Great Turkish War, Napoleon wrote, “Through Egypt, we will invade India.” Emboldened Italy yet frustrated to invade England, Napoleon landed in Alexandria on July 1, 1798, with an army of 40,000 men, accompanied des Sciences et des Arts tasked with investigating and mapping both ancient and modern Egypt.
In mid-July of 1799, faced with an imminent attack , the French ordered the demolition of Fort St. Julien at Rashid (Rosetta). Among the foundations, a block of granodiorite stone was discovered—fragmented from an ancient Egyptian stele with a decree published in Memphis under the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The decree appeared in three different scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top, Greek at the bottom, and between the two, an unknown inscription initially believed to be Syriac.
Its pivotal role in the decipherment of hieroglyphs was quickly recognized. It was carefully extracted from the ruins, cleaned, and the Greek section translated before being transported the Nile to the Cairo Institute, where its discovery was announced on August 19, 1799. The first task was to create exact duplicate copies of the texts. Two young Orientalists identified the central inscription as Demotic, a cursive script of the Egyptian language they had seen before on papyri and mummy bandages.
Copying have risked human error and taken months. Therefore, the stone was cleaned, the water in the crevices retained, and its surface inked and traced onto damp paper. Thus, on January 24
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