Napoleon Bonaparte's ambition to control all the area around the Mediterranean Sea led him and his French soldiers to Egypt. After losing a naval battle, they were forced to remain there for three years. In 1799, while constructing a fort, a soldier discovered a piece of stele (stone pillar bearing an inscription) known as the Rosetta stone. This famous stone, which would eventually lead to the deciphering of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics dating to 3100 B.C., was written in three languages: hieroglyphics (picture writing), demotic (a shorthand version of hieroglyphics), and Greek, Scientists discovered that the characters, unlike those in English, could be written from right to left and in other directions as well. Twenty-three years after discovery of the Rosetta stone, Jean Francois Champollion, a French philologist, fluent in several languages, was able to decipher the fast word - Ptolemy --- name of an Egyptian ruler. This name was written inside an oval called a "cartouche". Further investigation revealed that cartouches contained names of important people of that period. Champollion painstakingly continued his search and was able to increase his growing list of known phonetic signs. He and an Englishman, Thomas Young, worked independently of each other to unravel the deeply hidden mysteries of this strange language: Young believed that sound values could be assigned to the symbols, while Champollion insisted that the pictures represented words.

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