What ancient Egyptian artifact, discovered by the French in 1799, was instrumental in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, before eventually giving its name to a brand of computer language training software?
Ancient Egyptian literature Kircher (1601–1680) was the first in Europe to realize that Coptic was a direct linguistic descendant of ancient Egyptian. In his "Oedipus Aegyptiacus", he made the first concerted European effort to interpret the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs, albeit based on symbolic inferences. It was not until 1799, with the Napoleonic discovery of a trilingual (i.e. hieroglyphic, Demotic, Greek) stela inscription on the Rosetta Stone, that modern scholars were able to decipher ancient Egyptian literature. The first major effort to translate the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone was made by Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) in 1822. The earliest translation efforts of Egyptian
Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt is a primer on Egyptian hieroglyphics by Maria Carmela Betrò, later professor for Egyptology at Pisa University (published in Italian as "Geroglifici" in 1995; English translation 1996). The standard version of analytic Egyptian hieroglyphs is based upon the 26 categories of the Gardiner's Sign List, (about 700 signs). That categorization is still the basic standard. The approach in "Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt" is to use some of the Gardiner sign categories, to focus on specific major-use signs. The end of a thematic chapter then has synoptic