What does the passage mainly explain?

How one stone allowed scholars to read ancient Egyptian writing again (The passage follows the stone from its discovery to the moment its three scripts made hieroglyphs readable again.)

According to the passage, which text on the stone could scholars already read?

The Greek at the bottom (The text says plainly, 'Scholars could read the Greek,' which sat at the bottom of the stone.)

Why was it important that the three sections carried the same message?

It meant a text people could read could be compared with signs they could not (If the meaning is the same in all three, the known Greek gives a starting point for guessing the unknown signs. That is why the writer calls the stone a key.)

In this passage, 'decree' means

an official order or announcement (The decree was 'written by priests for a king' and carved in public on stone, so it is an official announcement, not a private or musical text.)

The Stone That Talked Back: Level 2 Reading Comprehension Questions

In 1799, French soldiers were digging near a town in Egypt. One of them found a broken slab of dark stone. The stone was covered with writing. It had three kinds of script cut into its surface: Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top, a second Egyptian script in the middle, and Greek at the bottom.

Scholars could read the Greek. The Greek text said that all three sections carried the same message, a decree written by priests for a king. So the stone was a kind of key. If the message was the same, the unknown signs could be matched to known words.

The work was still slow. For more than twenty years, scholars argued about what the signs meant. Many people believed that hieroglyphs were only pictures of ideas. In 1822, a French scholar named Jean-Francois Champollion showed that many of the signs stood for sounds, like the letters in an alphabet. With that idea, the old writing began to make sense.

The stone itself is not beautiful. It is grey, cracked, and incomplete. But it opened three thousand years of Egyptian records to modern readers.

Comprehension questions