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The Rosetta Stone Mystery      Strange writings and carvings adorned pyramid walls, ancient tombs, and other artifacts. The meticulously carved inscriptions obviously had meaning, but no one could decipher them. The voices of the great Pharaohs were silenced, no longer from the depths of the Egyptian sands, but from the limits of human knowledge.      For more than 1,400 years great minds tried to interpret the ancient Egyptian images. They were unsuccessful. However, in 1799 an accidental discovery changed everything. While rebuilding a fort in an Egyptian town called Rosetta (Rashid) one of Napoleon's soldiers found a stone bearing unusual markings. This stone, named after the town of its discovery, was the key to understanding hieroglyphics.      There were different kinds of writing in ancient Egypt: hieroglyphics, a sacred script used by priests to write about religion or the pharaoh; and demotic, a later cursive form of hieroglyphics used for everyday writing. Egyptians used this language for over 3,500 years. After Alexander the Great occupied Egypt a language that combined Greek and Egyptian dialect was created, called coptic. As the use of coptic became widespread the understanding of hieroglyphics faded away.      As fortune would have it, the Rosetta Stone contains three forms of writing: hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek. Scholars could understand the Greek writing, but the other two remained a mystery. When they realized that the stone could be saying the same thing three times, the race to decipher the stone began. The Cartouche Clue      Thomas Young was an accomplished physicist with a fascination for hieroglyphics. Young discovered the meaning of the cartouches - hieroglyphs encircled by oval figures. He deduced that these had special meaning and theorized that since a foreign name would not have a representative hieroglyph, it would have to be spelled phonetically. He recognized one cartouche as being the name Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals who became a pharaoh of Egypt. Young applied his theory to other cartouches and translated much of the demotic script. Thomas Young was often referred to as "the last man to know everything." The Sun-God Solution      "Je tiens l'affaire!" (I've got it!) Jean-Francois Champollion proclaimed with such excitement that he collapsed. Since childhood, Champollion was interested in hieroglyphics and the puzzle they posed. He vowed to one day achieve what no one else could: translate hieroglyphs.      After much diligence Champollion achieved his goal. He discovered that all of hieroglyphic script used phonetic, not symbolic, language - not just foreign names as Young believed. Champollion assumed that the scribes of the stone spoke coptic. His thorough understanding of coptic allowed him to link the two languages. The first carving in one cartouche was a sun. The coptic pronunciation of the sun god was "Ra." He then applied Young's method to the rest of the word and found that it ended with two S's. He was left with this clue: RA_ _S_S. The only name it could be was Rameses, another pharaoh. Since Ramses was Egyptian, it proved that all hieroglyphics were phonetic. Champollion worked on the translation for 20 years. He is often referred to as "the father of Egyptology" because of his work with the stone. The Pharaohs Live Again      The text of the Rosetta Stone was written by ancient Egyptian priests proclaiming all of the good deeds that Ptolemy did to benefit the people of Egypt. Others used Young and Champollion's work on the Rosetta Stone to translate many other hieroglyphiccovered artifacts.      Scholars had to think outside of the box (or the cartouche) to solve one of the biggest mysteries of ancient Egypt. Because of their creative problem solving, the Pharaohs are no longer silent.

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