Just saw a doc that keeps calling the Rosetta Stone a 'code breaker' and it's bugging me

I was watching a show on ancient Egypt last night and they kept saying the Rosetta Stone 'cracked the code' of hieroglyphs. That's not quite right. It gave scholars the same text in three scripts, so they could compare them. The actual work of figuring out the language took decades after they had the stone. Anyone else notice this mix-up in pop culture?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_julia1d ago

Is it really a big deal though? The show got the main point across that it helped figure things out.

danielwhite1d ago

Accuracy matters because details build the world. In season two, they changed the location of a key meeting from a real life diner to a generic coffee shop, which erased the local history that made the story feel true. When you swap out those specific facts, the "figuring things out" loses its roots and just becomes a TV plot. It stops being about how people actually solved a problem and starts being a made for TV lesson. That difference is everything to people who lived it.