The Egyptomania that swept Europe since the end of the 18th century led to a scientific race to unravel the most elusive of all its secrets: the deciphering of the hieroglyphs on tombs, temples and monuments. Linguists vacillated between various alternatives: some believed it was a symbolic language and others alphabetic. They were all partly right, but none, until Champollion, found the truth: they were symbols, but they were also used with two other functions: figurative and phonetic.
The crux of the matter was knowing when they were used with one value or another. In 1822 the French savant informed the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris of his success using the Rosetta stone as a dictionary. He had never set foot in Egypt. He didn’t need it. His first trip was six years later, in 1828.
