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Fascinating Biblical and Biblical Era Archaeology

Khalid Elhassan May 4, 2025 17 min

Archaeology - Ashurbanipal in a chariot, inspecting booty and prisoners from Babylon — Ashurbanipal in a chariot, inspecting booty and prisoners from Babylon. Wikimedia

10. The Undecipherable Hieroglyphics

Archaeology - The accidental discovery of the Rosetta Stone — The accidental discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Look and Learn

Centuries after Christianity reached Egypt, Islam arrived with Arabs and the Arabic language, which killed off Egypt’s demotic language and script as well. Eventually, knowledge of ancient Egyptian writing vanished. What was left was a country full of ancient monuments, covered with colorful and intriguing texts and symbols that nobody could make head or tails of.

Then Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. Pierre Bouchard was a French army captain who accompanied the expedition to Egypt. On August 21^st, 1799, as he supervised the restoration of an old fort near the town of Rosetta, Bouchard’s men uncovered a block of basalt three feet and nine inches high, and two feet and four inches wide. It was inscribed with three different types of writing – Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Egyptian demotic scripts.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.