He found that the hieroglyphics contained Coptic sounds. “I’ve got it!” Champollion allegedly cried, per National Geographic, when he made his breakthrough. Then, the French linguist fell ...

The symbols they used were called hieroglyphs, which comes from a Greek word meaning ‘sacred carving’. The ancient Egyptians believed that hieroglyphs had been invented by the gods.

Egypt was full of hieroglyphic writing on the walls of temples, palaces and on reams of flat sheets made from the papyrus reed, from which the modern word paper is derived. However, the priests ...