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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

9. Unraveling the Secrets of a Dead Language

Archaeology - The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum — The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. Wikimedia

Captain Bouchard immediately grasped the significance of what came to be known as the Rosetta Stone. He promptly alerted a team of French scholars who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. Nobody knew how to read hieroglyphs or demotic, but scholars could read Greek, and the Greek text informed archaeologists that the stone honored second century BC King Ptolemy V.

More importantly, the Greek text declared that the three scripts contained the identical message. The Rosetta Stone thus held the key to solving the riddle of the hitherto unreadable ancient Egyptian writing. Several scholars made initial progress in cracking the hieroglyphs, until Jean-Francois Champollion conclusively cracked the code in 1822. From then on, the language, history, and culture of ancient Egypt was opened to scholars as never before.

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.