Read the excerpt from The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone, by James Cross Giblin. Then, in 1887, yet another copy of the decree—this one almost intact—was unearthed in the ruins of a temple in Lower Egypt. Now, for the first time, scholars had a version of the hieroglyphic text that they could compare line-for-line with the Greek and demotic versions.

New translations of the hieroglyphic text were made in France and Germany, and an excellent English one appeared in 1904. A few sections still remain unclear, though. This makes present-day experts hope that an even more complete copy of the hieroglyphic inscription may yet be found, somewhere in Egypt.

The central idea of this excerpt is that a greater understanding of the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone became possible because