Hieroglyphs

Today the history of ancient Egypt is known around the world, recognisable in precious museum collections and countless retellings from popular culture. Yet for hundreds of years, from the late Roman Empire to the 19th century, the wonders of this ancient civilisation were frozen in time, locked in artefacts that could not be understood due to the loss of the ancient Egyptian language. In 1799 the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a slab inscribed in three scripts, hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, changed the course of history, unlocking thousands of years of ancient culture and eventually becoming one of the world's most famous museum artefacts. The British Museum's exhibition 'Hieroglyphs' and this accompanying publication tell the story of the Rosetta Stone and of countless other objects that were key to efforts to decode the hieroglyphs dating back to the Islamic Golden Age.