Published on April 1, 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 ever hieroglyphs in history, in some or other pieces of stone. The oldest we know of date from 3,250 BC, and together with cuneiform script, they 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 recent 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 “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt,” a display 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 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, and behind them, the whole sea of the desert.
The display cases of the exhibition contain fascinating objects such as Champollion’s and Thomas Young’s own 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.” Its stalks were used for shipbuilding, while its fibers served to make ropes, mats, sails, baskets, and sandals, and 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 although it was never used elsewhere, it was imitated throughout the kingdoms of ancient Sudan and appears to have inspired the Proto-Sinaitic script, which is in turn a possible 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. When this same appendage appears on coffins, it indicates the mummy of a male. Held in his left hand is a scepter crowned with a bird’s head—a scepter common to all the male deities of the Egyptian pantheon. 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. It is an aesthetic so powerful it begs the question—if the 19th century was one of revivals, why was a taste as refined as that of Pharaonic Egypt not 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 Napoleon, in the margins of a book about the Great Turkish War, wrote: “Through Egypt, we will invade India.” Emboldened Italy but frustrated to invade England, Napoleon landed in Alexandria on July 1, 1798, with an army of 40,000 men. He was accompanied des Sciences et des Arts (Commission of the Sciences and Arts), a group that sought to investigate and map both ancient and modern Egypt in the spirit of the prevailing Enlightenment.
In mid-July of 1799, faced with an imminent attack forces wishing to avenge Napoleon’s campaign in Syria, the French reinforced their coastal defenses. In Rashid (Rosetta), a port city on the western bank of the Nile delta, the demolition of Fort St. Julien was ordered, revealing a block of granodiorite stone among the foundations—a fragment from an ancient Egyptian stele with a decree published in Memphis in 196 BC under Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The decree appeared in three different scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top, Greek at the bottom, and an unknown inscription believed to be Demotic in the middle.
Its pivotal role in the decipherment of hieroglyphs was immediately recognized. It was cleaned, the Greek section was translated, and it was transported the Nile to the Cairo Institute where its discovery was announced on August 19,
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