The Long Forgetting

The loss of hieroglyphic knowledge was not sudden. As Egypt came under Greek and then Roman rule, the old writing systems gradually fell out of use.

The Rosetta Stone, discovered by Napoleon's army in 1799, carried the same text in hieroglyphics, Demotic Egyptian, and ancient Greek. Jean-François Champollion spent fourteen years cracking the code, finishing in 1822 and ending a 1,400-year silence in which no one on Earth could read the language of the pharaohs.

Champollion collapsed from exhaustion after his breakthrough and died at just forty-one.