Carol Donoughue

Good book, well-illustrated. The discussion of the efforts at decipherment by the various scholars is perplexing; something is missing to make it make sense. It becomes a bit more clear if you have already read a book for adults about the same subject.

There are questions directly within the text, e.g., "Why did they (the French savants who had come with the French army) not take photographs?" which can be perplexing.

The last few pages of the book discuss the hieroglyphs themselves, how to show more read and write them. But it all seemed oversimplified, and didn't correspond very well with the discussion of the decipherment. On the bright side, my chances of actually recognizing a Thutmose cartouche have gone up a bit since I read the book. show less

Hieroglyphs is a book unlocking the mystery of deciphering hieroglyphs. It starts by introducing Rosetta Stone and how this stone was found in Rosetta area in Egypt by one of Napoleons soldiers. Then it fell in the hands of Britain after a war between France and Britain. They made few copies of this stone and the unlocked and unknown writings on it and sent them to different parts of the country. People who were interested to unlock this mystery worked on it. Many of them were wrong. From show more few people that were right, each one of them unlocked certain parts of this mystery or Rosetta Stone. After many years of attempts by different people finally Champollion was able to read and unlock the mystery of these hieroglyphs.
I enjoyed reading this book and believe the children will enjoy and learn a lot from this book, about history and how different languages are alike or different. The pictures and maps helps the reader to understand the topic fully and makes it more interesting. show less

Lesson: How Does Our Economy Work?

(DON his)