“It is famed as a critical moment in code-breaking history. Using a piece of basalt carved with runes and words, scholars broke the secret of hieroglyphs, the written ‘language’ of the ancient Egyptians. A baffling, opaque language had been made comprehensible, and the secrets of one of the world’s greatest civilisations revealed – thanks to the Rosetta Stone and the analytic prowess of 18th and 19th century European scholars. But now the supremacy of Western thinking has been challenged by a London researcher who claims that hieroglyphs had been decoded hundreds of years earlier – by an Arabic alchemist.”