How did scientists learn to read ancient hieroglyphics?

Ancient Egyptians used small pictures, called hieroglyphs [HI-row-gliffs], to write. (Read more about hieroglyphic writing on page 20.) When archaeologists first saw this script, they didn’t know how to read it. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 helped solve the mystery.

The Rosetta Stone is a large, black stone with a surface about the size of a large television screen. There are three different kinds of writing, or script, on the stone: hieroglyphics, demotic (another Egyptian script), and Greek. Linguists (scientists who study language) realized that the stone had the same text written in three different ways. First, they read and translated the Greek text. Then they used this to read the Demotic script and finally to decipher the hieroglyphics.