The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than twenty years to solve the

riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name of Champollion began to

compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In the

year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the meaning of fourteen little

figures. A short time later he died from overwork, but the main principles of

Egyptian writing had become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is

better known to us than the story of the Mississippi River. We possess a written

record which covers four thousand years of chronicled history.

 

As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means "sacred writing") have

played such a very great role in history, (a few of them in modified form have

even found their way into our own alphabet,) you ought to know something about

the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago to preserve the spoken

word for the benefit of the coming generations.

 

Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every Indian story of our western

plains has a chapter devoted to strange messages writter{sic} in the form of

little pictures which tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters

there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult to understand the

meaning of such messages.

 

Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The clever people of the

Nile had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures meant a great deal

more than the object which they represented, as I shall try to explain to you