signs which appear on the four sides of the “Needle". These are called hieroglyphics, a term derived from the Greek words hieros “sacred ”, and glypho, “I engrave”, and first applied by the Greeks because they believed that picture writing was used only by Egyptian priests for religious purposes. Much of what we know regarding the myths, legends, and history of the land of the Pharaohs has been accumulated since modern linguists acquired the art of reading those pictorial inscriptions. The ancient system had passed out of human use and knowledge for many long centuries when the fortunate discovery was made of a slab of black basalt on which had been inscribed a decree in Greek and Egyptian. It is called the “Rosetta Stone”, because it was dug up at Rosetta by a French officer of engineers in 1799, when Napoleon, who had invaded Egypt, ordered a fort to be rebuilt. It was afterwards seized by the British, along with other antiquities collected by the French, and was presented by George III to the British Museum in 1802.
Copies of the Rosetta Stone inscriptions were distributed by Napoleon, and subsequently by British scholars, to various centres of learning throughout Europe. It was found that the Greek section recorded a decree, issued by the native priests to celebrate the first anniversary of Pharaoh Ptolemy V in 195 b.c. The mysterious Egyptian section was rendered in hieroglyphics and also in Demotic, a late form of the cursive system of writing called Hieratic. In 1814 two distinguished linguists—Dr. Thomas Young in Britain, and Professor Champollion in France—engaged in studying the quaint pictorial signs. The credit of having first discovered the method of reading them is claimed for both these scholars, and a heated controversy waged for long years over the matter. Modern opinion inclines to the view that Young
