The Rosetta Stone

This history follows the granite slab found in 1799 by French soldiers near Rosetta, bearing the same priestly decree in hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek. After the British take the stone to London, scholars compete to read the Egyptian scripts: Akerblad and Thomas Young make partial gains with the demotic and the royal names, and Jean-Francois Champollion works out the hieroglyphic system. The book sets the find within Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and the later museum quarrel over possession. It is a narrative of discovery and decipherment, not a grammar of ancient Egyptian.

Bound in cream vegetable parchment blocked with an wrap-around image of the Rosetta stone. Mid-brown slipcase. Mottled cream endpapers.