Part 9

We open our mouth wide and make a noise like a steam engine and the sound is written down "H."

It took the human race hundreds of thousands of years to discover this and the credit for it goes to the Egyptians.

Of course they did not use the letters which have been used to print this book.

They had a system of their own.

It was much prettier than ours but not quite so simple.

It consisted of little figures and images of things around the house and around the farm, of knives and plows and birds and pots and pans. These little figures their scribes scratched and painted upon the wall of the temples, upon the coffins of their dead kings and upon the dried leaves of the papyrus plant which has given its name to our "paper."

But when the Romans entered this vast library they showed neither enthusiasm nor interest.

They possessed a system of writing of their own which they thought vastly superior.

They did not know that the Greeks (from whom they had learned their alphabet) had in turn obtained theirs from the Phoenicians who had again borrowed with great success from the old Egyptians. They did not know and they did not care. In their schools the Roman alphabet was taught exclusively and what was good enough for the Roman children was good enough for everybody else.

You will understand that the Egyptian language did not long survive the indifference and the opposition of the Roman governors. It was forgotten. It died just as the languages of most of our Indian tribes have become a thing of the past.

The Arabs and the Turks who succeeded the Romans as the rulers of Egypt abhorred all writing that was not connected with their holy book, the Koran.

At last in the middle of the sixteenth century a few western visitors came to Egypt and showed a mild interest in these strange pictures.

But there was no one to explain their meaning and these first Europeans were as wise as the Romans and the Turks had been before them.

Now it happened, late in the eighteenth century that a certain French general by the name of Buonaparte visited Egypt. He did not go there to study ancient history. He wanted to use the country as a starting point for a military expedition against the British colonies in India. This expedition failed completely but it helped solve the mysterious problem of the ancient Egyptian writing.

Among the soldiers of Napoleon Buonaparte there was a young officer by the name of Broussard. He was stationed at the fortress of St. Julien on the western mouth of the Nile which is called the Rosetta river.

Broussard liked to rummage among the ruins of the lower Nile and one day he found a stone which greatly puzzled him.

Like everything else in that neighborhood, it was covered with picture writing.

But this slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered.

It carried three inscriptions and one of these (oh joy!) was in Greek.

The Greek language was known.

As it was almost certain that the Egyptian part contained a translation of the Greek (or vice versa), the key to ancient Egyptian seemed to have been discovered.

But it took more than thirty years of very hard work before the key had been made to fit the lock.

Then the mysterious door was opened and the ancient treasure house of Egypt was forced to surrender its secrets.

The man who gave his life to the task of deciphering this language was Jean Francois Champollion--usually called Champollion Junior to distinguish him from his older brother who was also a very learned man.

Champollion Junior was a baby when the French revolution broke out and therefore he escaped serving in the armies of the General Buonaparte.

While his countrymen were marching from one glorious victory to another (and back again as such Imperial armies are apt to do) Champollion studied the language of the Copts, the native Christians of Egypt. At the age of nineteen he was appointed a professor of History at one of the smaller French universities and there he began his great work of translating the pictures of the old Egyptian language.

For this purpose he used the famous black stone of Rosetta which Broussard had discovered among the ruins near the mouth of the Nile.

The original stone was still in Egypt. Napoleon had been forced to vacate the country in a hurry and he had left this curiosity behind. When the English retook Alexandria in the year 1801 they found the stone and carried it to London, where you may see it this very day in the British Museum. The Inscriptions however had been copied and had been taken to France, where they were used by Champollion.