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Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the idea of a page. He assembled movable metal type, an oil-based ink, and a press adapted from other trades, and he made books reproducible in Europe at a new speed. A text stopped being a thing a scribe copied by hand for one owner. It became a thing a workshop could repeat.

The press mattered because a book could finally be made more than once, on purpose.

Johannes Gutenberg · Encyclopaedia Britannica · 1455 · Factapp

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The Rosetta Stone carries one decree in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek. Because the Greek could already be read, Jean-François Champollion had a bridge into the pictures. The stone is not a dictionary someone kindly wrote. It is the same announcement, repeated, and that repetition is what made the old script speak again.

The same text in a known language is what opened Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Rosetta Stone · The British Museum · Year unknown · Factapp

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