An artillery officer of Napoleon’s army in Egypt, named Bouchart,
discovered near Rosetta, in 1799, an oblong slab of stone engraved with
three inscriptions, one under the other. The upper one (half of which
was broken off) was in hieroglyphics, the lowest one was in Greek, and
the middle one was stated in the Greek to be in the written characters
of the country. The Greek inscription told scholars that all three
inscriptions expressed a decree of the Egyptian priests, sitting in
synod at Memphis, in honor of King Ptolemy V.
Hieroglyphs are representations on stone, wood, or papyrus, of objects
or parts of objects, including heavenly bodies, human beings in various
attitudes, parts of the human body, quadrupeds and parts of quadrupeds,
birds and parts of birds, fishes, reptiles, etc., geometric and
fantastic forms, amounting in all to about a thousand different symbols.
More than six hundred are ideographic (idea-writing); i. e., the
engraved or painted figure, either directly or figuratively conveys an
idea which we express by a word composed of alphabetic signs. Thus,
directly, the figure of a man means “man;” figuratively the same figure
means “power.”