This article was originally published on Sept. 10, 2021.
Until 200 years ago, no one in the modern era could understand Egyptian hieroglyphs; ancient Egyptian was essentially a lost language. The fact that historians can now read and understand hieroglyphic inscriptions is down to an act of archaeological prowess involving a fairly banal, but ancient legal text chiseled onto a world-famous stone.
“Next year marks the bicentenary of the Rosetta decipherment, which really was a watershed moment for Egyptology,” says Roland Enmarch, senior lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. “It’s the single most famous translational artifact.”
