Enlightenment

British Museum. 

There is a magnificent room containing an exhibition about  the Age of  Enlightment (18th century), a time when people used reason and first-hand observation of the world around them to understand it in new ways.

There is a section in the room that talks about ancient scripts. The search for knowledge about the past led to renewed interest in deciphering the mysterious forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sanskrit and cuneiform. This scholarly activity eventually led to the "cracking" of their codes in the early 19th century, and thousands of years of history were opened up to research. 

The most important piece discovered: the Rosseta Stone, carved in Egypt in 196 B.C and found by the french in 1799.

Its written in 3 scripts:

Hieroglyphic: the script used in Egypt for important documents.

Demotic: the common script of Egypt.

Greek: language of the rulers in Egypt at that time.

After many years of studying the Rosetta Stone and other examples of ancient Egyptian writing, Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822. :-)