The Book of the Dead

This scene, from the Papyrus of Hunefer, shows the Hunefer's heart being weighed against the feather of truth. If his heart is lighter than the feather, he is allowed to pass into the afterlife. Vignettes such as these were a common illustration in Egyptian books of the dead.
'The Book of the Dead' is the common name for the ancient Egyptian funerary text known as 'The Book of Coming '[or 'Going']' Forth By Day'. The book of the dead was a description of the ancient Egyptian conception of the afterlife and a collection of hymns, spells, and instructions to allow the deceased to pass through obstacles in the afterlife. The book of the dead was most commonly written on a papyrus scroll and placed in the coffin or burial chamber of the deceased.[1]
The name "Book of the Dead" was the invention of the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius, who published a selection of the texts in 1842. When it was first discovered, the book of the dead was thought to be an ancient Egyptian Bible. But unlike the Bible, The Book of the Dead does not set forth religious tenets and was not considered by the ancient Egyptians to be the product of divine revelation, which allowed the content of the book of the dead to change over time. The Book of the Dead was thus the product of a long process of evolution from the Pyramid texts of the Old Kingdom to the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom. About one-third of the chapters in The Book of the Dead are derived from the Coffin Texts.[2] The Book of the Dead itself was adapted to The Book of Breathings in the Late Period, but remained popular in its own right until the Roman period.

Source (Wikipédia)

The Rosetta Stone

In 1799, during the Egyptian military campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte, a block of black basalt was discovered at Rosetta. A long message was written on it, with the same text repeated in three languages: Hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek. The rock block (today displayed at the British Museum) would become famous under the nickname of "Rosetta stone", as it was the key for the decryption of the old Egyptian Hieroglyphic code.

As in exactly the two following years after the discovery of the stone, Bichat's publications became the foundations for the knowledge of the textures/tissues, it can be said that those manuscripts were a kind of "Rosetta stone" of Histology.

The Egyptian hieroglyphic writing

The Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system consists of several hundred picture signs. The signs can be divided into two classes, phonograms and ideograms. Phonograms represent sounds, much as alphabet letters do. Ideograms are signs that represent whole words or concepts. The first hieroglyphs we know about appeared as early as 3100 BC and only the Sumerian language is believed to be older. Hieroglyph also had a variety of definitions of its own they were written in phonographs or ideograms. The Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics to make a record of what their view of the universe was. It is believed that the hieroglyphic system of writing was brought to Egypt by invaders who came from the north-east. The word hieroglyphics is made up of two Greek words hieros which means sacred, and glyphe, which means carving. Ancient Egyptian writing used over 2,000 hieroglyphic characters. The hieroglyphics picture signs can be written from right to left; from left to right; or vertically, reading downwards. Hieroglyphs turned out to be a combination of picture-writing and sound-writing.

This knowledge that we have today is all due to the Rosetta Stone without her we can never translate the Hieroglyphics.



I'll be posting about the Rosetta stone soon.