In 1799, Napoleon's engineers on his Egyptian campaign discovered the Rosetta Stone. Immediately, it caused a sensation in the learned circles of Europe, for on it were inscriptions in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic (a cursive from of hieroglyphics) and Greek. It was evident the three panels represented the same inscription in three languages, so it was possible to proceed with a decipherment of the hieroglyphs and the Demotic by reference to the Greek. In 1822, the genius of Jean-Francois Champollion finally solved the decipherment riddle. With this, the age of Egyptology proper began. A door to the past was opened that many had thought permanently closed.
The newly-translated inscriptions and documents revealed an intellectucal culture that had attained a startlingly advanced level of development. The prototypes of mathematics, medicine, astronomy, metallurgy, philosophy, religion and the arts were, by degrees, coming to light among the vast ruins of this intriguing civilization. For a people accustomed to believing for 15 centuries that all learning, all science, and all art had begun with the Greeks, the evidence of Egypt required a radical restructuring of thinking.
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