The Rosetta Stone, discovered in Egypt in 1799, contained the same decree inscribed in three scripts: Greek, Egyptian demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Greek was readable to scholars of the time, but the principles of hieroglyphic writing had been lost for centuries. Comparing the parallel texts allowed researchers, primarily Jean-Francois Champollion, to deduce that hieroglyphs encoded a combination of phonetic and symbolic meanings, opening the way to reading inscriptions across thousands of years of Egyptian history.
Which choice most logically completes the text? The passage suggests that the decoding of hieroglyphs depended on _______
- A
the spontaneous recovery of memories among native speakers
- B
the construction of new hieroglyphic inscriptions
- C
discovery of an extensive bilingual dictionary
- Dcheck_circle
parallel text in a known language allowing inferences about the unknown one
Explanation
Greek-readable parallel text enabling deductions about hieroglyphs supports B. A, C, D are unsupported.