discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was
in Greek. The Greek language was known. ``All that is
necessary,'' so he reasoned, ``is to compare the Greek text with
the Egyptian figures, and they will at once tell their secrets.''

The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than
twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French
professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the
Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In
the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the meaning
of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from
overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had
become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is
better known to us than the story of the Mississippi River.
We possess a written record which covers four thousand years
of chronicled history.

As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means
``sacred writing'') have played such a very great role in
history, (a few of them in modified form have even found their
way into our own alphabet,) you ought to know something
about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago
to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming
generations.

Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every
Indian story of our western plains has a chapter devoted to
strange messages writter{sic} in the form of little pictures which
tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters
there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult to