Hieroglyphs were far more than a language. They were an omnipresent and all-powerful force in communicating the messages of ancient Egyptian culture for over three thousand years. In this exciting new study, Penelope Wilson explores the cultural significance of hieroglyphs with an emphasis on previously neglected areas such as cryptography and the continuing deciphering of the script in modern times.

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most popular artefacts in the British Museum. Containing a decree written in Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphics, it proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. This concise study traces the history of `the most famous piece of rock in the world' to become a modern icon and tells the story of the race to use it to decipher Egypt's ancient script by Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Also includes a translation of the text.

In 1802, Jean-Francois Champollion was eleven years old. That year, he vowed to be the first person to read Egypt’s ancient hieroglyphs. Champollion’s dream was to sail up the Nile in Egypt and uncover the secrets of the past, and he dedicated the next twenty years to the challenge. James Rumford introduces the remarkable man who deciphered the ancient Egyptian script and fulfilled a lifelong dream in the process. Stunning watercolors bring Champollion’s adventure to life in a story that challenges the mind and touches the heart.

Throughout the pharaonic period, hieroglyphs served both practical and aesthetic purposes. Carved on stelae, statues, and temple walls, hieroglyphic inscriptions were one of the most prominent and distinctive features of ancient Egyptian visual culture. For both the literate minority of Egyptians and the vast illiterate majority of the population, hieroglyphs possessed a potent symbolic value that went beyond their capacity to render language visible. For nearly three thousand years, the hieroglyphic script remained closely bound to indigenous notions of religious and cultural identity. By the late antique period, literacy in hieroglyphs had been almost entirely lost. However, the monumental temples and tombs that marked the Egyptian landscape, together with the hieroglyphic inscriptions that adorned them, still stood as inescapable reminders that Christianity was a relatively new arrival to the ancient land of the pharaohs. In Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination, Jennifer Westerfeld argues that depictions of hieroglyphic inscriptions in late antique Christian texts reflect the authors' attitudes toward Egypt's pharaonic past. Whether hieroglyphs were condemned as idolatrous images or valued as a source of mystical knowledge, control over the representation and interpretation of hieroglyphic texts constituted an important source of Christian authority. Westerfeld examines the ways in which hieroglyphs are deployed in the works of Eusebius and Augustine, to debate biblical chronology; in Greek, Roman, and patristic sources, to claim that hieroglyphs encoded the mysteries of the Egyptian priesthood; and in a polemical sermon by the fifth-century monastic leader Shenoute of Atripe, to argue that hieroglyphs should be destroyed lest they promote a return to idolatry. She argues that, in the absence of any genuine understanding of hieroglyphic writing, late antique Christian authors were able to take this powerful symbol of Egyptian identity and manipulate it to serve their particular theological and ideological ends.

Hieroglyphs from A to Zo is the first book published by PomegranateKids , an imprint of Pomegranate Communications, in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. With bold graphics, charming, rhyming text and solid educational content, it explains the hieroglyphic code while imparting important facts about ancient Egypt. As an added bonus, a separate sheet of stencils is provided, slipped inside the back cover, so that kids can easily draw their own hieroglyphs. All told, this is the perfect book for any child who simply loves words and pictures.

A remarkable intellectual adventure reaching from the filthy back streets of Georgian London to the hushed lecture rooms of the Institut de France, from the forgotten byways of provincial France to the splendor of the Valley of the Kings, this book reveals the decipherment in its full historical complexity"--.