Discovery of scholar's notes shine light on race to decipher Rosetta Stone

Exclusive: Thomas Young used cut-up method to treat translation of Egyptian relic as mathematical problem, papers show

Nobody knew how to read hieroglyphs when two 19th-century scholars set out to decipher the inscribed texts on the ancient Egyptian Rosetta Stone, one of the British Museum’s most famous treasures.

Now notes have been discovered among one of the scholars’ papers in the British Library that reveal the extent to which the translation was treated as though it was a mathematical problem.

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