[eli5] How were gerogliphs understood and what was Rosettas stone role in the process.
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The geoglyphs are in Peru and the Rosetta stone was in Egypt, so I assume you mean hieroglyphics.
The Rosetta stone was a notice of change in government policy. It was written in hieroglyphics, Greek, and Egyptian (the written language of the commoners)
At the time, Egypt was under the Ptolemaic dynasty (who were Macedonian and spoke Greek). The formal written language of important documents was hieroglyphics, and the commoners who could read and write only knew Egyptian. They wanted to make sure that everyone could understand this document, so they wrote it in Greek and Egyptian, and added hieroglyphics because of how official the document was.
When the French found it, we could read ancient Greek, and we figured out that the 3 sections of the Rosetta stone all said the same thing, so we were able to decode the other two languages easily.
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