July 15, 1799 (approximately). In the town of Rashid on the Nile Delta, French soldiers and Egyptian laborers are rebuilding an old, falling-down fort, when someone spots something unusual. It’s a jagged black rock, inscribed with what looks like three different types of writing. This stone—the Rosetta Stone—will become the key to deciphering a language that had been lost for thousands of years. Today: the race to unlock the secrets of hieroglyphs. How did two scholars manage to decode a language that no one in the world spoke? And when modern people could finally read the messages left by a long-dead civilization, what were we able to learn? Special thanks to our guest, Edward Dolnick, whose book, The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, comes out in October 2021. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.