Until French scholar Jean-François Champollion began his work, it was assumed that hieroglyphics were simply pictorial representations of the words they represented. Champollion proved that they were a complex mixture of pictograms, phonetic sounds and alphabet letters and that the ancient Egyptian language is related to Coptic, which still exists in the Coptic Christian Church. Hieroglyphics are a type of writing called a rebus system.

It uses symbols borrowed to represent new words with the same sounds, regardless of the original meaning. So ‘I see you’ would be drawn as ‘eye sea ewe’. By unlocking the ancient language of Egypt, Champollion unearthed a world of knowledge.