Who brought this dead language back to life and figured all this out? In 1799, one of Napoleon's soldiers in Egypt found a stela, or inscribed stone. This is the famous Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, London. On it the same text was written in three different languages: Greek and two different kinds of Egyptian. By comparing the Egyptian hieroglyphic signs in the oval rings, or cartouches, with their Greek counterparts, a brilliant French scholar named Champollion was able to crack the hieroglyphic code in 1822.

What is there to read in ancient Egyptian? Just about everything you could imagine: letters, accounts, legal texts, and religious spells. There are autobiographical inscriptions, royal decrees, poems, battle accounts, love stories, "wisdom literature," and medical treatises. There are even recorded proceedings of the court trials of tomb robbers. New texts are constantly being discovered and translated. In fact scholars have written more grammar books and dictionaries on ancient Egyptian than on any other ancient language. The Museum's Egyptian galleries contain pen-and-ink cases used by scribes for writing materials, and even flakes of limestone that served as their "doodle pads."