Everyone can certainly say that these numbers are unbelievable, probably no one can even imagine how a culture existing a couple of millennia before Christ was able to create such monuments. However, the answer to it all was always in front of the eyes of the next civilizations, in the form of Egyptian written texts. But there was a big problem to be solved. In the history of the world, nobody was able to decode the meaning of the mystical “symbols”, Egyptian writing (hieroglyphs) .. until the 19th century.

GETTING CLOSER .. BUT STAYING STILL TOO FAR

Nobody knew if the single signs of the Egyptian writing denoted letters, syllables, words or whole sentences; if these inscriptions are read from right to left or from left to right, from up to down or from down to up; and, of course, nobody knew the language in which the texts were written down. It was an Egyptian language but it has no connection with the language spoken in present day Egypt. Scientists did not know what vocabulary, morphology or grammatical rules it had. So it should not be very surprising that it took so long to decode this language, not used for thousands of years.
Jean François Champollion was born in 1790 on Christmas day in Figeacu, a French town. He was a genius child:
p 5 years old - he was able to write and read (he learnt it without the help of adults) when he was comparing learnt prayers with the texts in his mother’s prayer book;
p 9 years old - he spoke Greek and Latin (he learnt it from his father’s books);
p 11 years old – he read the Bible in Hebrew;
p 13 years old – he studied Arabic and Syriac :
p 15 years old – he studied Persian and dead languages of the East; and Chinese in his free time;
p 17 years old – he became a member in the Academy of Sciences in Grenoble;
He was very interested in Egypt. He studied its history, culture and language for about two decades and this helped him to decode the Egyptian language. The basis of his laborious work was a flat black stone, as big as a desk, found in 1799 near the Nile, on which there was an inscription in three different languages: in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in unknown writing and in Greek. He compared these inscriptions and he was able to define several hieroglyphs, by comparison with papyrus rolls he was then able to create a hieroglyphic alphabet and slowly and patiently find the meanings of every “hieroglyphic picture”. This was a very short description of his work but it is important to know that one man helped other scientists and put the basis of their explorations related to Egypt.