James Giblin's book, "The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone" uses a dramatic flare to tell the how the discovery of the Rosetta Stone allowed scholars to unlock the secrets of ancient Egypt. Until its discovery, Egyptian history, literature, and religious beliefs remained a mystery because for 1,400 years no one could decipher the hieroglyphs. The information Giblin presents is sufficient, easy for a reader to understand, and supports his idea that understanding hieroglyphs was difficult.
The information he presents is sufficient in proving that the Rosetta Stone was very important understanding ancient Egyptian culture. Giblin provides the information about the writers, priests, and scholars who tried to decipher the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone starting with Horapollo, a Greek writer in the 5th century, all the way to Dr. Young, a scientist in 1814. Giblin also describes how the Rosetta Stone was first found. For example, a French army officer gave a note that said that he French scholars that the stone was had been dug out of the ground in a fort near a town in Rashid, 35 miles North of Alexandria. The French soldiers were tearing down walls of the fort when they saw the stone." Giblin also provides sufficient information for readers by showing hieroglyphic pictures and symbols as well as the demotic alphabet by Jean-Francois Champollion helped decipher for understanding the meaning of hieroglyphs.
The details that Giblin includes are easy for a reader to understand. For example, Giblin uses each chapter of his book to describe a new scholar and their steps taken towards making progress towards deciphering the Rosetta Stone. In Chapter 4, Giblin describes the background of Jean-François Champollion and makes it easy for the reader to understand how "for many years Champollion’s progress was blocked because, like de Sacy and earlier scholars, he believed the hieroglyphs represented things, not sounds" but changed his thinking when he was given a copy of an inscription that had been found in the ruins of a temple on the Nile River island of Philae." (Giblin, 19--). This changed everything and helped him prove that the hieroglyphs represented sounds and not a picture writing representing animals and objects.
Giblin's book "The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone" supports the idea that understanding hieroglyphs was difficult. The author shows that before the Rosetta Stone was found in 1799, early scholars like the Greek writer Horopolo and German priest Kircher tried to make sense of the hieroglyphs. Their nonsense explanations such as Horopollo's beliefs that the image of a rabbit meant “open” because a rabbit’s eyes never close and that vulture drawing meant "mother" for wildly false reasons or Kircher's nonsense claims that a certain group of symbols (really stood for the name of a pharaoh) meant “The blessings of the god Osiris are to be procured by means of sacred ceremonies" (Giblin, 19--). Others like French scholar C. J. de Guignes figured out the cartouche but still made silly proclamations that the Egyptians had colonized China and even worse, Egyptians came from China. After Napoleon left Egypt, the French, whose soldiers found the Rosetta stone, ended up surrendering the stone to the British. Despite this, the French were able to keep etchings of it. Several scholars like de Sacy, his pupil Ackerblad, were able to create an alphabet of the demotic symbols to decipher several names. Heinrich Karl Brugsch and Dr. J. J. Hess were the most successful in translating most of the demotic symbols. Bringing the world closer to the Stone's hieroglyphic meanings, British scholar Dr. Young discovered that the beginning of the hieroglyphic inscription was missing, but most of the final lines were complete. Young compared them carefully with the last lines in the demotic version, and discovered for the first time that the demotic script was not completely separate from the hieroglyphic. The final discoveries by Jean-Francois Champollion proved that the hieroglyphs were not purely symbolic. Thousands of scrolls were brought to Europe and America and "scholars, using the deciphering methods Champollion had pioneered, traced the entire history of writing in Egypt" (Giblin, 19--). By the 19th century, scholars realized that the hieratic form was done on papyrus, hieroglyphs used when carving inscriptions in plaster or limestone. and hieratic writing was simplified and became the form known as demotic which was used to carve one of the passages on the Rosetta Stone.
