This masterpiece outlines the Rosetta Stone and its history, the controversy around the discovery and the decipherment which gave the key to understanding the hieroglyphs. Using this as his starting point, the author continues to explore the role, power and importance of writing in Ancient Egypt as well as its many aspects (such as scribes and the tools used) and its relation to art. Readable, enjoyable and very informative, accompanied by black and white illustrations, it is recommended for anyone interested in Ancient Egyptian language.

In mid-July 1799, Pierre François Xavier Bouchard, a French officer serving Napoleon, stumbled upon a piece of rock at el-Rashid, on the west bank of the Nile. This large yet fragmentary slab, now known as the Rosetta Stone, contains text written in three different scripts and dates back to the year 196 BC. The Stone records the "Memphis Decree," a priestly declaration concerning the assignment of numerous honors on the king, Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited in the British Museum since 1802. Both the British Museum Press and the University of California Press published this book as an accompanying extract to a British Museum exhibit celebrating the bicentenary of the Stone's discovery.

The principal author, Richard Parkinson, is currently Assistant Keeper in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum. His Cracking Codes is an attractive and fascinating work in both content and form for every booklover.

The subtitle The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment might leave readers to believe they will be reading exclusively about the Stone, yet this is not so, for this book is not concerned with only that particular subject. Contributing authors offer essays covering the description of decipherments, such as Linear B and Meroitic the latter has yet to be decoded. In this book, Parkinson provides an extremely expressive, pleasingly organized and beautifully illustrated account accompanied by comprehensible details of linguistic matters regarding the process of decipherment. Parkinson begins with the Rosetta Stone itself and discusses the study of hieroglyphs from Horapollo through Kircher to the flowering of the scientific investigation of language in late 18th and early 19th-century Europe.

The publisher deserves praise for it is quite unusual to sell such a magnificent, well-produced and superbly illustrated work at a reasonable price. There is at least one high-quality photograph of each of the items in the catalogue, and an additional 75 illustrations (mostly photographs of other artefacts) are spread throughout the book; there are also 31 colour plates in the centre.

In the first chapter, Deciphering the Rosetta Stone, Parkinson relates the story of the Rosetta Stone's discovery and its role in deciphering the demotic and hieroglyphic language of the Ancient Egyptians. He presents the rivalry and interaction between the two men who vied for the prize, the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion and the Englishman Thomas Young. Though these circumstances might be familiar to most readers, the contents of the Rosetta Stone might not be. It is disappointing that Parkinson does not give a complete transliteration and translation of the 14 preserved lines of hieroglyphic text : He provides only RS Simpson's translation of the demotic (in the Appendix); he also ignores the Greek entirely.

The second chapter, Reading a Text: The Egyptian Scripts of the Rosetta Stone, gives a brief, yet exceptionally well-structured description of the development of the Egyptian language and of the principles of hieroglyphic writing. A commentary on two Egyptian words, mjw 'cat' and sd_m 'hear' is included in this section. Parkinson clearly explains, with reference to numerous artifacts, the importance in Egypt of felines, and of ears and listening.

The third chapter, Towards Reading a Cultural Code: The Uses of Writing in Ancient Egypt, contains a catalogue of over two hundred objects on display at the exhibition. It provides a surprisingly flawless combination of descriptive text and individual catalogue entries for 86 statuettes, papyri, wall paintings and other such objects all related to Ancient Egyptian writing. Nearly twenty of these objects are published in this book for the first time. Dealing with writing in its cultural context, Parkinson uses examples of artefacts to give the reader a window on the world of Egyptians from cats to kings, with an understandable emphasis on people who were at least partly literate including, of course, scribes. Parkinson also elaborates on the equipment of writing and on what is known about their lives.

In the final chapter, The Future: Further Codes to Crack, which reminds readers that there is still work to be done in understanding the ancient Egyptian language, Parkinson deals with two other topics: the Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic scripts (Coptic is naturally based on Greek), and some completely different languages and scripts that have recently or not yet been deciphered.

While it is clear that the so-called "hieroglyphic" and "cursive" forms of the Meroitic script derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs and demotic, respectively, the language itself is largely obscure. The relationship between Egyptian hieroglyphs and what is known as Proto-Sinaitic script is discussed. Parkinson also mentions the exciting ongoing successful decipherments of Hieroglyphic Luvian, Linear B, Mayan hieroglyphs, Carian, the Indus script and Linear A. The chapter ends with a short essay by Whitfield Diffie and Mary Fischer titled Decipherment versus Cryptanalysis.

The language and culture of ancient Egypt (first and foremost the Rosetta Stone) have a remarkably broad influence on Western culture as well as Egyptian studies. This book shows how exciting the study of Egyptology can be especially when ancient Egyptian writing and culture are treated as normal every-day functions. Books such as Parkinson's Cracking Codes are a rare and valuable contribution : meticulous in scholarship, but also accessible to the general public.