Before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, everything was so dark to us; we did not understand anything about the religious belief of the ancient Egyptian, the life, the architecture of the pyramid, or anything. All this has been recorded.

I believe that the most important discovery that made our eyes clear, and give us life, and give us evidence for the first time, is the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799. And this is why I believe that the Rosetta Stone is like the icon of our identity. Because without the Rosetta Stone, we know nothing about those people, those people will be dark, their knowledge, that did go up to the top and they ruled this world, could be finished. We didn’t know anything about them, but now all of us can read the ancient Egyptian because of the discovery of the Rosetta stone. It happened during the French campaign, they were excavating and working and cutting a trench in Rosetta, which is down near Alexandria, and they found it.

And that’s really why Napoleon’s expedition was very important to us. When they found the stone, they knew the value of the stone, and they took it and they sent it to be studied by scholars. And Champollion was the first one. He found this decree, as written in the time of Ptolemy the second, to be given by the priests as a grateful act - and that was written in two languages.

The ancient Egyptian language was divided to three scripts, number one: the hieroglyphic - the sacred language, the sacred script that you actually can read in tombs and temples. And after that you have the hieratic, which is for writing between people - it’s the cursive of the hieroglyphic. The third one is the demotic - which came from the word ‘demos’, in Greek means people - the spoken language. And, therefore, he found out that the Greek text should be similar exactly to the demotic and the hieroglyphic.

Champollion began to compare between the Greek language and its letters and the hieroglyphic. Then he began to reconstruct the hieroglyphic based on the Greek text. And it took him time. He was a genius linguist. He knows, I think, more than five, six languages at that time. And this helped him a lot. In the same time, Coptic also came from hieroglyphic, and still you can see letters in the Coptic language that are taken from the ancient Egyptian language. And he looked at cartouches, like this long cartouche of Cleopatra, and the letters in this cartouche did help him to reconstruct the whole language.

The Rosetta Stone was given by the French to the English during the war, and now it’s in the British Museum. I was in England about two months ago, and I did speak - not officially - to the director of the museum, Vivian Davies, to ask if they are willing to give this to us to be shown, on a temporary basis, in the Cairo Museum for a few months, because, I said, this Rosetta stone is the icon of our Egyptian identity.