Case Study
January 29, 2026

ButterBook

The Butter Book Project is a pastry and coffee startup, based in Midtown Memphis, TN.

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ButterBook

The Butter Book Project is a pastry and coffee startup, based in Midtown Memphis, TN.

The Inscription: A Multilingual Key

What made the Rosetta Stone extraordinary was its inscription in three different scripts:

  • Hieroglyphic: The sacred script used in religious & official texts.
  • Demotic: A more common script used in daily Egyptian writing.
  • Greek: The language of the ruling Ptolemaic government.
This discovery unlocked the hieroglyphic code.

Since scholars could already read ancient Greek, they realized that the stone contained the same message in all three scripts.

Ra's Vessel
Egyptian artifact
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Ra's Vessel
Egyptian artifact
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The Inscription: A Multilingual Key

For decades, scholars worked to crack the linguistic puzzle. It was Jean-François Champollion, a French linguist, who made the breakthrough in 1822.

By comparing the Greek text to the hieroglyphs, he identified phonetic symbols corresponding to royal names like Ptolemy and Cleopatra.

By comparing the Greek text to the hieroglyphs, he identified phonetic symbols corresponding to royal names like Ptolemy and Cleopatra.

About axom

axom is a sofware and brand agency based in Memphis, TN and Lexington, KY.

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