What did the Egyptians ever do for us …?

The Rosetta Stone isn’t something that crops up in conversation over a cup of tea, but it should.

It’s kept in the safe hands of the British Museum and is just one of over 8 million objects housed there.

And it just happens to be one of the most famous objects in the museum’s vast collection.

The stone is more than 2,000 years old, but it holds a valuable lesson for anyone sweating over fresh content for anything from a web page to a new brochure.

Produced around 196 BC, the stone provided the key to deciphering the most beautiful and enigmatic of all writing systems – Egyptian hieroglyphics.

A technique older even than the pyramids themselves.

Okay, 196 BC to 2020 AD is a bit of a stretch for it to be a helpful lesson, but why is it so interesting?

You see, until the stone’s discovery in 1799, there had been much scratching of hairy backsides as scholars tried to make sense of it all.

Centuries had passed in fruitless quests to make sense out of these wonderfully enigmatic inscriptions.

Even with the stone, it still took linguists with brains the size of OpenAI’s Sargate data centre 23 years to crack it.

Which brings me back to the present day.

When we craft copy for our own products and services, we’ve got seconds to grab our readers’ attention and get them to act.

Never mind 23 years to work out what it is you’re offering; the average reader spends less than 15 seconds deciding whether something is worth reading or not.

A hugely valuable lesson to all of us, whether we’re writing our own sales material or getting someone else to do it for us.

If you’d like to bounce around a few ideas on how to do that, please drop me a line.

Until next week.

Alec