Robert Solé and Dominique Valbelle
The Rosetta Stone
The Story of the Decoding of Hieroglyphics

When a French soldier in Napoleon's army unearthed a large piece of granite near the small town of Rosetta, no one realized the startling impact it would have on anthropology, specifically Egyptology. The stone turned out to contain text written in Greek, demotic Egyptian, and hieroglyphics. For the first time there seemed a real hope of decoding Egyptian writing. The Rosetta stone became the only link to the lost language of hieroglyphics, which had not been written in over fourteen centuries.

In The Rosetta Stone, Robert Solé and Dominique Valbelle trace the history of the stone starting with its discovery in Rosetta in July 1799 to its theft from the French by the British army and subsequent arrival in London where it was studied by the top minds of their day. Despite the untiring work of such highly competitive intellectuals as Thomas Young, an English physician, and Johann David Akerblad, a Swedish diplomat, the first to uncover the means of deciphering the language was the French Orientalist Jean-Francois Champollion.

The Rosetta Stone is sure to be an essential guide to any one in the field of Egyptology as well as those who are interested Egyptian history.

Robert Solé is an internationally known novelist and journalist of Egyptian origin. Among his books published in English are Birds of Passage and The Photographer's Wife.

Dominique Valbelle is a leading Egyptologist, author, and director of the Institut de papyrologie et d'égyptologie at the University of Lille III. She is also the president of the French Egyptological Society.

Together, they have created an accurate and entertaining account of the Rosetta stone's history.

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