n the British Indian
Colonies. He did not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a
failure. But, quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved
the problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language.

One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary life of his
little fortress on the Rosetta river (a mouth of the Nile) decided to
spend a few idle hours rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta. And
behold! he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else
in Egypt it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of
black basalt was different from anything that had ever been 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 understand the meaning of such messages.

Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The clever people of
the Nile had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures meant
a great deal more than the object which they represented, as I shall try
to explain to you now.

Suppose that you were Ch