Book Review

...the Army of Napoleon won Egypt for a while in 1798. About a year later soldiers of the French army dug up a black slab of rock about the size of a small tabletop in an old fort at the mouth of the Nile near a town they called Rosetta... that stone bore three inscriptions: the third was in Greek, easy for them to read, dated in 196 B.C., and two others with the same message, one in the sacred hieroglyphics no one has been able to read for 1500 years, and one in a later simplified form of that sacred writing. ...Giblin briefly recounts the opening of the decipherment, with examples and good humor, in language well suited to readers and code-writers in the middle grades. ...what the authors have done is prepare a careful full-sixed drawing of the Rosetta Stone just as it is now in the British Museum... A brochure includes full modern translation of each of the texts, and a concise scholarly summary of the long history of the decoding. Can you find the clues Thomas Young saw in 1814 that began the story?

~ Philip and Phylis Morrison, Scientific American excerpt

If you like puzzles, it's all here, the hypothesis, the false starts and the discovery.

~ Lee Grodzins, Ph.D., Physicist, Professor Emeritus, MIT

This book is a great quick history of Egypt and provides interesting insights into the development of language and the process of discovery.

~ Anne Hayden, Natural Resources Consultant, Author