He had a particularly strong interest in Oriental languages, and was given the task of trying to interpret the writing on the Rosetta Stone. After his success with the Rosetta Stone, Jean-François Champollion continued to decipher the meaning of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. He gifted the ...
The women felt at ease in the courtyard, with the familiarity that unites people in a boarding school or a prison. That sort of confidence, however, sprang not so much from living under a common roof as from shared knowledge of the harsh lives they lived: though unaware of it, they felt...
The stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts inscribed by priests of Ptolemy V in the second century B.C.– Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Egyptian demotic. The Greek passage proclaimed that the three scripts were all of identical meaning– so allowed French Egy...
In its original form, the letter A was upside down and reminiscent of the head of an animal with horns or antlers. In ancient Semitic, the letter translates to ‘ox.’ Letter B The original form of the letter B comes from the Egyptian hieroglyphics where it looked like a house with a...
I sold the shirt from my back and scraped together the sum required. ‘Surely,’ the god said, when issuing his final order, ‘you’d not hesitate to pawn your rags to fund your idle pleasures, so why now, on the brink of a vital act, do you brood on a state of poverty which ...