How a Tax Break Helped Us Decipher 3,000 Years of Egyptian History
This week, like 61% of all Americans, you paid your taxes for wonderful things like the Ukraine war, Harvard’s tax exempt status and federal employees whom it appears are extremely difficult to fire (I kid, I kid). In 2021, the top 1% (earners of more than $682,000 in income) 42% of all taxes while the top 10% (making more than $158,000) pay 75%. 39% of Americans don’t pay any Federal tax. Interesting stuff but not as interesting as the story of how a tax break cracked the code to Egyptian history.
Did you know the single most important archaeological artifact in history is basically a government press release about a tax exemption?
Welcome to the story of the Rosetta Stone, the ancient rock that cracked open the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs—all thanks to a decree that said, in essence: “Let the priests keep their money.”
Three Scripts. One Decree.
Discovered in 1799 by Napoleon’s troops in Egypt and promptly seized by the British, the Rosetta Stone wasn’t much to look at. A 1,700-pound hunk of granodiorite, broken at the edges, inscribed with the same message three times: once in hieroglyphs, once in Demotic (the common Egyptian script of the day), and once in Ancient Greek.
Why three? Because in 196 BCE, the ruling elite in Egypt were ethnically Greek (thanks to Alexander the Great), but the population was still mostly Egyptian. So when the priests wanted to suck up to Ptolemy V—the teenage pharaoh barely holding on to power—they issued a decree in all the major written languages of the land. Politics 101: speak to your base.
The message? The king had done some nice things—in particular cutting taxes for the priests and granting some temple privileges. The priests were grateful (everyone likes a good tax cut) so they put up stone tablets in temples across Egypt to spread the word and reinforce his divine legitimacy.
After Cleopatra and the fall of the Ptolemies, hieroglyphs faded. By 400 AD, no one could read them and for 1,400 years, they were just mysterious bird-and-eye doodles. Enter the Rosetta Stone (and now you know why the language learning program is called that!).
As scholars could still read Ancient Greek, the Rosetta Stone was a linguistic translator. For the first time, they could compare a known language with its unknown Egyptian counterparts—side by side.
The breakthrough came from Jean-François Champollion, a French scholar who, unlike others, realized hieroglyphs weren’t just symbolic—they were phonetic. Some stood for sounds, especially when spelling foreign (Greek) names like “Ptolemy” and “Cleopatra.” He pieced it together, letter by letter, and by the 1820s, he’d cracked the code.
That was the moment when history changed. Suddenly, 3,000 years of Egyptian civilization—from tombs to temples, royal decrees to religious texts—were readable. Not guessed at. Read.
Pretty cool. So thank your accountant for reading about all the random deductions you claimed this year and remember what my dad always said: “Paying taxes is good…. It means you make money.”
I agree. Happy Easter and God Bless.