A vivid and superbly written account of the unravelling of one of the great intellectual puzzles, set against the backdop of Europe in the Napoleonic era. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, his troops were astonished to discover ancient temples, tombs and statues, all covered with hieroglyphs -- the last remnants of an unreadable script and a language lost in time. On their return Egyptomania spread rapidly and the quest to decipher hieroglyphs began in earnest. Jean-Francois Champollion was obsessed with ancient languages from a very young age, and once he heard of the unreadable ancient Egyptian text he had found the challenge to which he would dedicate his life: the decipherment of hieroglyphs. Despite poverty he made gradual progress, although he had to fight against jealous enemies, both professional and political, every step of the way -- a dangerous task when in post-Revolutionary France a slip of the tongue could mean ruin, exile or even death. Failure threatened, as he was only one of many attempting to read the hieroglyphs, and his main rival, the English Thomas Young, claimed that decipherment was imminent, but Champollion refused to be distracted and finally, in 1822, he made the decisive breakthrough: he was the first person able to read the ancient Egyptian language in well over a thousand years.

英国夫妻作家莱斯利和罗伊·亚京斯（L e s l e y & R o y A d k i n s）都是考古学家、伦敦古文物协会会员。莱斯利拥有布里斯托大学考古学、古代史、拉丁文的学位；罗伊拥有卡迪夫大学考古学学位。他们曾经合作出版了《英国考古学手册》《罗马书入门》《考古学入门》《考古学图解》《古罗马生活手册》《古希腊生活手册》《罗马宗教词典》等著作。