The Unreadable Script The young French soldier was hot, thirsty and tired. He had been involved in Napoleons Egyptian expedition for months. Hed marched through the desert with no water, chasing after strange pools of liquid that miraculously appeared on the horizon, and then cruelly disappeared as he approached them. Hed also choked on storms of dust that raced across the landscape. Now he and his companions had been assigned to tear down an ancient wall so they could build an extension to Fort Julien. Backbreaking work. As he pried another stone out of the wall, its color struck him as being odd. It was dark, almost black actually. On one side that was flat there appeared to be writing of some sort. Not French, to be sure, but some strange script. No, not just one type either, but three different types. Very odd. He decided to call over the officer-in-charge over to take a look at it. What that young, unnamed soldier had done was to discover the Rosetta Stone - an unremarkable chunk of black rock, covered with seemingly indecipherable markings - that would solve one of the greatest linguistic mysteries of the 19th century: how to read the ancient writing left by the Egyptians thousands of years ago. Today on Far Future Horizons we present a BBC documentary titled “The Mystery of the Rosetta Stone” part of BBCs history series Egypt. farfuturehorizons.blogspot/2014/02/the-mystery-of-rosetta-stone.html
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 17:52:29 +0000
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