All that began to change in 1798when Napoleon’s armies invaded Egypt.
While learned scholars guessed at the significance of the various squiggles and symbols, no one could actually read the writing. As a result, hieroglyphs came to be regarded as emblematic or allegorical, each figure a concentrate of complex meaning, like a cross or the diagram of a fish among Christians. 394, but the writing system had already grown esoteric, used principally by a priestly caste and pretty much a mystery to everyone else. But what did the individual symbols mean? The last known use of hieroglyphs occurred in A.D. Since the time of Herodotus, Europeans had been fascinated by hieroglyphs, those little pictographs of birds, geometrical figures, snakes, crouching lions, shepherd’s crooks and striding figures so familiar to us from such movies as “The Mummy.” This mysterious writing appeared on sarcophagi and the walls of royal tombs, on clay shards, obelisks and bits of papyrus. The man who finally cracked the code was a young Frenchman named Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832).
Roughly 200 years ago, however, the original Rosetta Stone provided the key to deciphering the most beautiful and enigmatic of all writing systems, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Open almost any glossy magazine - especially if it’s sponsored by an airline - and you’re likely to find an advertisement for Rosetta Stone, a computer-assisted program for learning a foreign language. Book World: ‘Cracking the Egyptian Code,’ by Andrew Robinson, explores hieroglyphs MICHAEL DIRDA’S WASHINGTON POST REVIEWS: from August 23rd 2012 to February 17, 2008.