Have you ever wondered where all writing began? Have you often thought about the secrets of life that ancient civilizations took with them to their graves? If so, you should be very interested in an ancient writing technique called hieroglyphics, which many scientists believe is the origin of all writing (Bolia 2). Hieroglyphics are not only one of the oldest recorded languages, but they also have a history far longer than that of any other. Hieroglyphics were first written down around the end of the fourth millennium BC, and then remained in continuous use until around the 11th century AD, a period of over 4,000 years (Reagal 6). There are many misconceptions about the origin of hieroglyphs. Some scholars believed that hieroglyphs originated in other languages. Some people thought that the hieroglyphs spelled nothing at all. Still others believed that hieroglyphs were an indication of social stratification or social significance. This uncertainty would most likely have persisted if a political event had not intervened. The almost constant war between Britain and France led to a major change in the understanding of hieroglyphics. The French, under Napoleon Bonaparte, decided that they could defeat the British by attacking Egypt and subsequently controlling the rich food supplies throughout the Empire. Napoleon and his men were stranded in Egypt. They began to remodel the Rosetta Fortress. Then, in 1799, Lieutenant Bouchard discovered a slab of basalt stone during the renovation of the Rosette fortress. The stone measured three feet nine inches long, two feet four and a half inches wide, and eleven inches thick and contained three distinct bands of writing. The most incomplete strip was the upper strip containing hieroglyphics, the middle strip was an Egyptian script called demonic script, and the lower strip was ancient Greek. This stone was called the Rosetta Stone. The lieutenant took the stone to the scholars and they soon discovered that it was a royal decree that essentially stated that it had to be written in the languages ​​used in Egypt at the time. Scholars began to focus on the demonic writing, the middle strip, because it was more complete and more letter-like than the images in the upper strip which were hieroglyphics. It was essentially a shorthand hieroglyph that evolved from an earlier shorthand version of Egyptian called the Heiratic script (Hieroglyphs 237). The first to make sense of the demonic writing on the Rosetta Stone was a French scholar named Silvestre DeSacy. DeSacy was an important and competent French linguist. He identified the symbols that made up the words "Ptolemy" and "Alexander", thus establishing a relationship between the symbols and