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What explains our fascination with hieroglyphs? In part, surely, it is their sheer expressive beauty. We in newspapers are always looking for more elegant typefaces to catch your eye and enhance our limping prose. But however pretty the chosen font, our words — and the alphabetical symbols that they contain — remain intractably abstract. You may look at the word “bird” or “custard” and conjure in your mind’s eye a beautiful plumed creature or a tub of the gooey yellow stuff. But you don’t see them on the page. Whereas with hieroglyphs, you do. Or at least, you think you do — though that impression can be mightily deceptive, as we shall see.

So, as with Mandarin, there is pleasure to be derived from looking at the exquisite pictographs of the Ancient Egyptians, irrespective of whether one has the foggiest notion of what they mean. But there’s an even more thrilling quality about hieroglyphs. It’s that they look less like a dead language than a secret code, full of oddly familiar yet inscrutable signs which, we feel sure, hold the answers to centuries of riddles.

This code-like quality isn’t surprising. For about 1,200 years, from when Egyptians stopped writing hieroglyphs in the 6th century to the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone in 1822, a secret code is exactly what they were — and one, moreover, that had resisted countless attempts to break it.

It was the rediscovery in the 15th century of a tract called Hieroglyphica, by the 5th-century scribe Horapollo, that triggered these fruitless mind games. It seemed to offer tantalising clues to the long-lost language, and the Medicis ordered their finest scholar to stop work on translating Plato and have a crack at deciphering Ancient Egyptian writings instead. He got nowhere. Nor did Isaac Newton a couple of centuries later, when — convinced that the Ancient Greeks had pinched their mathematical and philosophical ideas from the Egyptians — he set about trying to fathom the latter’s texts.

The problem was that Horapollo had propagated a crucial misunderstanding of hieroglyphs. He implied that each had a mystical meaning, whereas we now know that some symbols, called phonograms, conveyed consonants only (the Egyptians unhelpfully omitted vowels from texts); some (determinatives) conveyed meaning; and some (logograms) conveyed both. The tale of how that discovery was made is the most enthralling in the history of archaeology: a combination of derring-do, pillage, nationalistic rivalry and linguistic genius.

It began with Napoleon’s ill-starred Egyptian campaign in 1798 — the one that ended with Nelson’s routing of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile. Napoleon was intent not just on imperial expansion but on cultural conquest, too. Determined to unlock the secrets of Egypt’s past, he took with him a regiment of historians and archaeologists. That paid dividends. While helping to build a fort against the British just north of a village called Rosetta, a French officer called Boussard unearthed a broken slab of black basalt, about a metre wide, with inscriptions in three languages.

The significance was realised straight away, because the languages were identified as “formal” hieroglyphs and demotic (a form of joined-up hieroglyphics used in everyday life), neither of which was understood, and Ancient Greek, which was. Substantial parts of all three inscriptions had been chipped off. Even so, if the stone contained the same message in three languages, could the hieroglyphs at last be deciphered? Napoleon’s scholars had no time to find out. Nelson’s victorious troops ran them out of Egypt and plundered the Rosetta Stone, shipping it to London, where it has resided in the British Museum ever since. But the French had carefully kept copies of the texts — and thus began the great race to decode them.

Both sides, British and French, fielded a genius. The British one was Thomas Young. His primary field of study was medicine and physics; he invented modern optics with seminal deductions about the nature of light. But he also had an astonishing gift for languages. It was said that he had read the Bible (twice) by the age of 4, and that he had learnt Latin, Greek, Arabic, Persian and four European languages before turning 20.

As a hobby, during summer holidays in Worthing, he turned his scintillating mind to the riddle of the Rosetta Stone, and made a huge breakthrough. A few years earlier a Dane called Zoega had suggested that hieroglyphs contained in oval rings (called cartouches) had royal names in them. Young seized on this to identify the name of Cleopatra and a few characters of the name of Ptolemy. By 1819 he was able to supply Encyclopaedia Britannica with meanings for hundreds of demotic and hieroglyphic symbols. But Young was too engrossed in other scientific pursuits to follow through with his Egyptian researches.

So the buck passed to an equally astounding scholar across the Channel. Jean-François Champollion was another linguistic prodigy, learning Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Latin and Greek as a child, and adding Ethiopian, Sanskrit and Persian at university, before picking up Coptic (a form of Egyptian written with Greek characters) when he met an Egyptian priest in Paris. “I have started to think in Coptic,” Champollion once exclaimed, to the consternation of his family.

It was the Coptic wot did it. Building on Young’s work, Champollion realised that Ancient Egyptian phonetics were related to modern Coptic. He also made the crucial distinction between phonograms, determinatives and logograms. Comparing the proper names inscribed on other obelisks, he was able to unlock symbol after symbol. Finally, he shouted “I’ve got it” to his brother, and promptly collapsed into a coma-like trance for five days, overcome by the emotion of reaching his goal.

Rather sportingly, Thomas Young was in the audience in Paris in 1822 when Champollion gave his momentous lecture laying bare the millennium-old mysteries of hieroglyphs. “It may be said,” the Englishman ruefully wrote to a friend, “that [Champollion] found the key in England which has opened the gate for him . . . but if he did borrow an English key, the lock was so dreadfully rusty that no common arm would have strength enough to turn it. Were I ever so much the victim of the bad passions, I should feel nothing but exaltation at Mr Champollion’s success.”

The “key” that Champollion turned in 1822 opened the door not just to a language, but to an entire civilisation. Nearly two centuries on, it still holds us in its thrall.

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