The Slow Decoding of the Rosetta Stone

In 1808, a seventeen-year-old French linguist named Jean-François Champollion stood before a copy of the Rosetta Stone in Paris and knew — with the certainty of a calling — that he would one day read Egyptian hieroglyphics. But the stone did not yield its secrets all at once. For fourteen years, Champollion labored. He mastered Coptic, Arabic, and ancient Greek.…