One of the most famous artifacts in the British Museum is a broken part of a stone slab called the Rosetta Stone. It was discovered in 1799 in Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte’s soldiers and seized by the British in 1801. A message is carved into the slab. The message itself is not important; it is simply a decree that states that the priests in the Memphis, Egypt, temple supported King Ptolemy V. What made it a major discovery was that it said the same thing in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic (the script of the everyday language of the Egyptian people), and ancient Greek. In 1801, no one knew how to read hieroglyphics, but many scholars knew how to read ancient Greek. Thus, they were able to compare the Greek to the hieroglyphics, and by 1822 the French philologist Jean-François Champollion, building on the previous work of the English physicist Thomas Young and others, had deciphered many of the hieroglyphics, although learning continued for many more years. Based on your reading in Topic 1 about the importance of human communication, which statement best explains why so many people put in so many years of effort to understand a language that had been long dead?