Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment

Published by the British Museum Press in 1999, Cracking Codes accompanied an exhibition at the British Museum marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the Rosetta Stone's discovery. Richard Parkinson, then Assistant Keeper in the museum's Department of Egyptian Antiquities, wrote the book. It traces how the stone's parallel inscriptions in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek were used to unlock the Egyptian scripts.

The 208-page book follows the competing efforts of Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion to read the stone. It then widens out to the social and practical uses of writing in ancient Egypt, the relationship between hieroglyphs and pictorial art, and related decipherment cases including Linear B and Meroitic script. A selective catalogue of the exhibition's objects runs alongside the main text, with contributions from Whitfield Diffie, Mary Fischer, and R. S. Simpson.

Parkinson worked in the British Museum's Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan for more than two decades. Alongside that curatorial work, he published widely on Middle Kingdom literature and Egyptian poetry.