From the beginning, deciphering of the mysterious Egyptian writing fascinated everybody. In 1799 a captain in the French Army supervising soldiers work around the town of Rosetta, when workmen discovered a stone which was destined to achieve great fame in the archaeological discoveries’ history. This discovery was “The Rosetta Stone”, and this led to the deciphering of Hieroglyphs.

The fortunes of wars had the Rosetta Stone fall into the hands of the Brits, where it landed in the British Museum. On one face of the Rosetta Stone, a tablet of extremely hard black basalt, there is a long trilingual inscription, the three texts being written one above the other. The first of the inscriptions, 14-lines long, is written in Hieroglyphs. The second, 32-lines long, is written in demotic, from the Greek word “Demos” meaning people, which refers to a type of script used ordinary people. Hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek, shall be engraved in each of the great temples of Egypt.

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Two English scholars had the honor of deciphering the hieroglyphs writings on the Rosetta Stone. However, Champollion claimed to be the man that deciphered the hieroglyphs on the stone. After his death in 1832 he left behind a very substantial and rich dictionary of ancient Egyptian history. The outer line of the Rosetta Stone, archaeologists call a “Cartouches” or Kartouche. It was precisely from names of Queen Cleopatra and Ptolemy, engraved inside their cartouches on the Rosetta Stone. Champollion started his long work on deciphering hieroglyphs in the stonework of their temples or paint scribed them with a pen on rolls of Papyrus paper, what later transformed into our current paper.

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Papyrus paper comes from a perennial plant, the plant stem varies in height from 8 to 17-feet. The white pith of the stem gets cut into sections which are laid out on a flat surface, with different layers crossing each other, and stuck together at the edges. The entire sheet is then soaked in water and allowed to dry in the sun, preferably with a stone or some sort of weight on top of the plant layers. Several sheets can be joined in layers vertical and perpendicular on top of each other, to produce a long trip which can later be rolled up. This is how the ancient Egyptians used to do their writings, document archaeology, decorate their Egyptian Temples.

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Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Egyptian Papyrus Paper

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