Practice Tests
IELTS Reading (AC) Task 1 #120

A. The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous archaeological artefacts in the world, primarily because it was the critical key that unlocked the secrets of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Discovered in 1799 by a French soldier during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, the stone is a fragment of a larger stele, a carved slab of stone, inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC. Its immense historical importance lies not in the content of the decree itself, which is a fairly routine text praising King Ptolemy V, but in the fact that the decree is inscribed in three different scripts.

B. The inscription on the stone is presented in three parallel texts: the top in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle in Demotic script (a cursive form of Egyptian writing), and the bottom in Ancient Greek. At the time of its discovery, Ancient Greek was well understood by scholars, but both hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts had been indecipherable for over a thousand years. The trilingual nature of the text provided a unique opportunity for direct comparison, as it was correctly assumed that all three scripts recorded the same message.

C. The decipherment was a long and collaborative process involving several European scholars, but the final breakthrough is credited to the French philologist Jean-François Champollion in 1822. He built upon the work of others, particularly the English scholar Thomas Young, who had correctly identified that some of the hieroglyphs in cartouches (oval enclosures) were phonetic representations of royal names like "Ptolemy." Champollion took this idea further, methodically comparing the hieroglyphs with the Greek text and correctly deducing that the hieroglyphic system was a complex mixture of phonetic, ideographic, and determinative signs.

D. The successful decipherment of the Rosetta Stone was a watershed moment for the field of Egyptology. It opened a direct window into the rich and complex world of ancient Egyptian civilization, allowing scholars to read thousands of previously unintelligible texts from temples, tombs, and papyri. For the first time, it was possible to understand ancient Egyptian history, religion, literature, and daily life from the perspective of the Egyptians themselves, transforming our knowledge of this ancient culture from one based on speculation to one founded on textual evidence.