Erudite but engaging. Treads a delicate balance between the discoveries of Young and Champollion. ( )

This Folio Society book is a beautiful keepsake of the story behind the discovery and deciphering of the world famous Rosetta Stone. The book details how the stone was found and how people soon realized the importance of its three language inscription. It then goes to explain how the engraved text led to clues in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The book has three photo inserts to supplement the text. The volume ends with a second book that teaches the reader the basics on how to read those hieroglyphs. ( )

Popular in English as well as in original French, this is the memorable story of the trilingual inscribed stone, millennia old but rediscovered 1799 by the troops of Napoleon in Egypt, which helped decode the hieroglyphs of that ancient culture.

Mostly, it tells of the "meeting" of that one stone with one man, French Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), the main interpreter of the intricate symbol structure & grammar behind the text, & thus known as a "father" of Egyptology. But there are important nuances in this book. It appears that far more people than Champollion contributed, & that much more text than one relic was needed for ancient Egypt to speak, once again, to him & to humankind.

Among other contributors to the interpretation, the English (who captured the Rosetta stone & hold it to this day at the British Museum) are justly proud of the versatile Thomas Young, but Scandinavians can take pride in the exceptional & essential earlier contributions of the Danes Fredrik Norden & Jørgen Zoega; of a Germano-Dane, Carsten Niebuhr; & of the Swede JD Akerblad. Decoding the hieroglyphs was, it turns out, a truly European enterprise, a focus of both Enlightenment & romanticism, hotly embraced by the learned community of its time. When Champollion died at 41, prematurely exhausted by his immense toil of insight, precision & rigour, he had scarcely wasted a minute of his short days, yet the hieroglyphs were still not adequately understood. This craved the rest of the 19th Century, & the work is by no means "complete" even today. The solemn idiom, marshaling a painfully elaborate mix of ideographic & phonetic devices, is not like its obvious classical opposite Latin, a more immediate language for us to approach. Even to learn it demands angelic patience from conscientious scholars. From that point of view - & only from that view, because the scope & richness of several thousand years of Egyptian is unfathomably vast - I resolved to stick with polishing my Latin. Not that I'm not otherwise tempted.

The book's authorship is the fertile collaboration of a French-Egyptian writer & intellectual (R Solé), with a full-blooded academic, holder of the Sorbonne's Egyptology professorship (D Valbelle). It strikes the exact measure between highly entertaining narrative & more scholarly, meaty material. Another desirable balance is between East & West, a popular issue these days. Ancient Egypt was neither because it still united both, which surely gives it tremendous force & application toward our own modern destiny.

This is a slim work, read in a few sessions, but it articulates a splendid tale resounding from an archaic, exalted past, as well as from the more recent emergence of scientific Europe. ( )

This book is translated from the French. The Rosetta Stone story from the French point of view. Wonderful reading ( )