Julie Pike, age 12, of Mariette, Georgia, for her question:

What is the Rosetta Stone?

The message itself is merely a tribute to a long ago pharoah. The Rosetta Stone on which it is carved is important because the tribute is repeated in three languages. When it was found, the meaning of the first and oldest script had been forgotten in the dim past. The script of the third repetition was recent and well known. It provided the key to the first. The Rosetta Stone not only translated one of mankind's first written languages    it revealed how its ancient picture writing progressed logically to phonetic letters.

Napoleon's army was in Egypt and his men knew the value of ancient relics. In 1799, an inscribed tablet was unearthed in the Rosetta area of the Nile Delta. We are not sure who found it, but the Rosetta Stone became famous overnight. There were countless inscriptions in an ancient style written on papyrus and carved on stone. But at that time scholars were unable to translate them. They were written in stylized pictures called hieroglyphs and their meanings were forgotten when this ancient written language progressed to more sophisticated letters and words.

One look at the Rosetta Stone told scholars that its three inscriptions repeated the same text in ancient hieroglyphs, in the later Demotic language and again in well known Greek words. They assumed that it would be easy to use the Greek and Demotic texts to solve the secrets of the ancient hieroglyphs. But the famous stone also held the secret of how and why man's early picture words graduated to written languages. It was 23 years before the riddle was solved.

The famous tablet is a table top slab of black,'hammer hard basalt    three feet nine inches long, two feet four and a half inches wide and 11 inches thick. The text is repeated in three horizontal columns, all neatly inscribed by master craftsmen. The Greek translation revealed it to be a public tribute to Ptolomy V Epiphanus in the year 196 B. C. In recognition for this good pharoah's generous favors to his people and priests he was declared a divine god. The same tender tribute was repeated in the Demotic writing, then popular in Egypt. Surely these clues could solve the riddle of the same text in hieroglyphics.

For years, the scholars tried to match the written words to those ancient pictures. Then a French student named Jean Francois Champollion saw why this matching game led nowhere. When the hieroglyphs progressed to written language, the old pictures were not used as words. They were given phonetic sounds and streamlined to form letters. The forgotten picture writing of 5,000 years ago finally was deciphered in 1822. Scholars at last could read its ancient inscriptions on papyrus and stone.

Champollion's tedious task was a work of genius. He learned Coptic and other old languages to find his clues. His genius led him to explore the minds of those ancient scribes who gradually gave phonetic sounds to their pictures    and used them as letters to build the sounds of words.