Nile flooded every year, creating wealthy green oasis surrounded by desert 

Pharaohs reigned from 3100 BC to 30 BC when Cleopatra committed suicide 

“For Europeans, Egypt conjured up a hodgepodge of beauty (Cleopatra!) and grandeur (the pyramids!) and mystery (the Sphinx!). All this was seasoned with a soupçon of shivery horror (mummies!) that amped up the excitement.”

Hieroglyphs considered a mystical form of writing conveying profound truths instead of mundane language, like math of today; in contrast to derided cuneiform 

Rise of Christianity and Constantine’s conversion in 300s ensured fall of hieroglyphs and polytheism 

Last hieroglyphs inscribed in 394 AD

Cathedrals of Middle Ages the first man-made structures to stand taller than the pyramids 

France had invaded Egypt in 1798 with young general Napoleon; French soldiers repairing broken down fort in Nile delta (French called the town Rosetta) spotted the stone among rubble 

Stone had originally been placed in a temple in 196 BC, which was destroyed several centuries later; reused in 1470 AD for new fort

“The laborers who wrestled the stones into place may have ignored the Rosetta Stone’s inscriptions. Possibly they never noticed them. In any event, they set the stone in position alongside countless others, an anonymous block in an anonymous wall in an anonymous fort. This was akin to using a Gutenberg Bible as a doorstop.”

“Learning to read takes work. That thrusts each of us into the heart of the Rosetta Stone story, because every one of us has performed almost precisely the same kind of decoding that finally cracked the Egyptian case—every new reader struggling to bring life to the squiggles in The Cat in the Hat is a pint-sized counterpart of the brilliant sleuths who first wrestled with hieroglyphs. Reading is deciphering, and we are all linguistic detectives. Each of us has worked at Bletchley Park.”

How to explain Egypt’s appeal compared to other ancient cultures? Scale (like dinosaurs), mysterious but not out of reach

Egyptian obsession with death and the afterlife: showed they relished life and happy assurance of defeating mortality; also may be overestimated because tombs and cemeteries were relegated to dry (preserved) desert edges compared to towns in wet fertile ground 

Pyramids were built by free men, not slaves and not Jews 

Egyptians knew of the wheel from neighboring empires for centuries but chose not to use it for a long time; culture and art was conservative 

Napoleon wanted crown jewel for France and himself; brought cadre of scientists, artists, scholars (savants) to observe and civilize 

France’s fleet at Alexandria destroyed by Royal Navy under Horatio Nelson, stranding them

Supervisor of fort rebuilding (Bouchard) both a savant and soldier so luckily and uniquely qualified to notice significance

Inscriptions from 196 BC; Greek portion crammed with tributes to teenaged pharaoh Ptolemy V, “like the flip side of the list of King George’s misdeeds in the Declaration”

Last lines decreed should be inscribed in “the writing of the words of the gods [hieroglyphs], the writing of documents [mysterious middle section (Egyptian demotic)], and the writing of the Ionians [Greek]”

Napoleon secretly abandoned army to return to France to manufactured glory; remaining savants eagerly explored the country documenting relics 

Denon an aristocrat turned savant who drew temples, monuments, and copied hieroglyphs for posterity: “Mine is an ardent piety, a blind zeal ultimately to be compared only to that of vestals of old who prayed, believed, and adored in a foreign language they did not understand.”

Drawings savants made in 3 years in Egypt would prove invaluable and historic

Remaining French army surrendered to British in 1801 and had to forfeit booty, including Stone; took big stuff but let savants keep their drawings and collections 

“The Rosetta Stone is the ultimate message in a bottle, adrift on the waves of time more than two thousand years before it was finally found. It was not intended as a message for a far-off audience; the idea was that it would be read at once, where it stood. But its discovery so many centuries after the disappearance of Egyptian culture makes it seem almost like the first-ever communication from an alien world.”

“Decipherers’ tools are intuition, experience, and deep knowledge, but they could never even get started without the archaeologists and explorers who bring back inscriptions from musty tombs and half-buried temples. This makes for odd partnerships. Will Shortz, meet Indiana Jones.”

International cooperation was complicated by the wars and disorder of Napoleonic Europe

Savants, sponsored by French government, published multivolume Description of Egypt in 1828

British Thomas Young and French Jean-Francois Champollion 

Young read article about Chinese language creating words for foreign names out of individual Chinese sounds of the name; insight led to finding foreign name Ptolemy in hieroglyphs throughout surrounded by cartouches (ovals)

Young continued making discoveries, some inadvertent: found “pharaoh” but thought it was “temple” or “great house”; but Egyptians called pharaoh “great house” (per-aa… pharaoh)

“Stories of invention or discovery always get the balance wrong, because a true picture would linger on false starts and futile wandering, and not on the ever-so-rare breakthroughs. No reader could put up with so disheartening a tale. After the truth has finally been found, Einstein once remarked, “the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and final emergence into light—only those who have experienced it can understand that.”

Qualities needed for codebreaking/deciphering: brainpower, doggedness, infinite tolerance for drudgery, gift for making sudden leaps of imagination 

Historian Stephen Budiansky: “The ideal cryptanalyst is Beethoven with the soul of an account; or vice versa.”

Hieroglyph = Greek for “sacred engraving”

Horapollo an Egyptian priest around 400 AD who wrote book on hieroglyphs (long after their obsolescence); asserted hieroglyphs were emblems/allegories not writing and his scholarship was considered sacred for centuries after Greek translation discovered in 1419

Impulse and bias to treat hieroglyphs as mystical symbols instead of writing delayed discovery for centuries 

“With hindsight, it seems bewildering that deep thinkers insisted even into the Age of Science that hieroglyphs concealed mystic truths behind elaborate masks. The trouble began with misplaced faith. Plutarch and Horapollo and the others were names to reckon with, and the trappings of antiquity gave added weight to their pronouncements. Though they had lived long after the days of the pharaohs, they were still a thousand years closer to their Egyptian sources than the European scholars who echoed their words. Renaissance writers deferred to them much as theologians of their era deferred to the founders of the church.”

Conventional renaissance assumption was that the Egyptians were deep bold thinkers and hieroglyphs were to conceal mysteries from unworthy 

“Every generation patronizes its predecessors for having been so dim, forgetting that soon enough it will be our turn to stand in the corner and feel foolish.”

Hieroglyphs used visual puns and rebuses (words represented by combos of pictures and letters), and homonyms that tripped up scholars 

“Hieroglyphs were not only redundant, as it turned out, but extravagantly and outlandishly redundant. Hieroglyphic writing is one of those intellectual structures, like subatomic physics, that grow ever stranger as you delve deeper.”

“We tend to think of the alphabet as the ultimate in writing systems. The hard-to-shake notion is that the history of writing is a long saga of crude ideas culminating in the alphabet, in much the way of those evolutionary charts that show an awkward creature heaving itself ashore and then a series of misshapen, hairy ape-men gradually straightening themselves up on the long climb to … us. Evidently that’s wrong. Though writing was invented independently several times—in China, the Middle East, and the New World—scholars believe that the alphabet was invented only once and then spread across the globe. But the rise of the alphabet had little to do with its peculiar merits and a great deal to do with the rise and fall of empires. If history had taken a different turn and the Maya or the Chinese had conquered Europe, they would have imposed their character-based scripts on the locals (along with their language and their customs). Alphabets, whatever their virtues, would have sunk into disuse.”

“So the hieroglyphic system of writing, which was indeed complicated, redundant, and inconsistent, flourished even so. Partly, as we have seen, because hieroglyphs turned out to have merits that compensated for the drawbacks. One merit stood above all the others. Hieroglyphic script was beautiful, and people will endure a great deal for the sake of beauty. In hieroglyphic writing more than in many scripts, aesthetics were crucial. Appearance trumped convenience.”