A rock of ages for humanity

 In 1999, on the bicentenary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's soldiers in Egypt, the British Museum carefully cleaned the granite-like stone of its 19th and 20th-century accretions and staged a fine exhibition with an excellent catalogue, under the title Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment . Both were the work of Richard Parkinson, a curator at the museum. Now he has distilled the story into a beautifully illustrated booklet.

It replaces a somewhat dowdy-looking booklet on the same subject by an earlier curator, Carol Andrews, published in 1981 by the British Museum Press, which had nevertheless passed through multiple impressions - not surprisingly, given the fact that the Rosetta Stone is the museum's top-selling postcard and its most visited single item, as Parkinson informs us. It is "a symbol of both decipherment and also empathy across cultures and time".

The new booklet bursts into colour, including accurate photographs of the recently cleaned stone - now no longer blackened but restored to its original delicate shade of dark grey with a pink vein. And it does more than this. Its main achievement, apart from its attractive and well-chosen illustrations, is to set the stone's inscription properly in context, so that it is not seen chiefly as a challenge for decipherment but also becomes a historical and cultural document. Parkinson has made his name in Egyptology as a translator of ancient Egyptian literature, and he brings that specialised knowledge and the skill to enliven it into his approach to what is, in truth, a dry decree by a little-remembered boy ruler, Ptolemy V, issued in 196BC many centuries after the glory days of the great pharaohs. In a sense, he humanises the Rosetta Stone for the modern viewer.

He writes: "While the Stone has always been, from the moment of its creation, an artefact created by, and contested between, different competing cultures" - first Egyptian, Greek and Roman, then Arab, and latterly French and British - "it is nevertheless also a symbol of their ability to communicate with and decipher each other across space and time.

Broken and slightly battered, it remains a symbol of the enduring power of human understanding."

In fairness to the earlier booklet, this new cultural emphasis comes at some cost to the reader's understanding of the process of the decipherment of the stone, first by Thomas Young and then, triumphantly, by Jean-Francois Champollion, his French rival. The new account seems to me a little too sketchy for the uninitiated to follow, especially as it dispenses with most of the hieroglyphic examples in the old account. It also underplays the extent of the rivalry between the two decipherers (covered in Cracking Codes ), omitting to mention the clear warning sent to Young by Champollion's former teacher in Paris that the brilliant student might also be capable of unscrupulousness. Moreover, the list of further reading omits both the English translation of Champollion's fascinating Egyptian Diaries published in 2001 and Maurice Pope's The Story of Decipherment (and, curiously, the earlier booklet by Andrews).

Andrew Robinson, literary editor of The Times Higher , is the author of Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts .