You need sharp elbows and the assertiveness of a seasoned Women's Institute member to see the Rosetta Stone.
But I still marched my eight-year-old son along to the British Museum to see it during the Summer holidays.
The pragmatic part of me whispered internally that this black stone in a glass case, inscribed with three languages, was not the place to take my son, Felix. He needed the nearby mummies and tombs.
Yet still I stopped there, on the outer edges of the gathered crowd, advising him on tactics to get a front row view.
"When you see a space in front of you, just move straight into it," I coached.
He did. And within three minutes, exhibiting unusual tenacity, he was face-to face with the Stone.
I thought he'd glance-and-go. But no: he seemed hypnotised. He stood there, batting away tourists twice his height, for longer than he should have: maybe six minutes.
Just gazing.
Later, he explained. He loves it more than anything else in the British Museum; because it's a code. A key to stories he doesn't know.
The man in charge of the Rosetta Stone loves it for the same reason.
Richard Parkinson raids the writings of a lost civilisation in a bid to put them into books which you and I could read and enjoy.
As Assistant Curator of the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum, he is not only the guardian of the Stone, but an arch-translator.
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It's a huge privilege, looking after the Rosetta Stone", he told me, "for reasons that are counter intuitive: I stop thinking of it as only something wonderful and exotic and I look at the Rosetta as something that can even be a bit of a nuisance.
"It's a very heavy stone: and suddenly my problem becomes, how do we move it? How do we transport it?
"Just like that," he added, "we are thinking about it in practical terms like the Ancient Egyptians. We finally understand it as they would have done.
"I get to see these artefacts face to face, and they lose their Hollywood mystique."
And when you're not dazzled by the glare of archaic glamour, the words are allowed to tell their own stories.
Richard cherishes an obsession with the language gap of some four millennia.
This is the man who, together with colleague John Nunn, translated Beatrix Potter's'Tale of Peter Rabbit' into hieroglyphs (British Museum Press, 2004).
A one-off, the work of shifting a Victorian text 4000 years into reverse proved a supreme challenge, requiring one foot in the sands of Ancient Egypt and one in the English landscape .
Nunn was approached by the Beatrix Potter Society, who wanted to add Ancient Egyptian to the 36 languages into which the children's book has been translated.
"The initial idea was to translate it into schoolboy Egyptian,", Richard said, "but I suggested we should do it properly, to find an equivalent in Ancient Egyptian for Beatrix Potter's style, and I'm glad we did that. Lots of amateur societies use it and it's very popular."
Now he's about to bring a key Ancient Egyptian tale 'The Tale of The Eloquent Peasant- hitherto the dusty prerogative of a few chosen academics - to the people, in a Reader's Commentary is due to be published by ''Lingua Aegyptia (Goettingen) in Spring 2012.
It's a pithy poem about a nasty man who lays a snare to rob a peasant of his hard-won produce, as the peasant and his donkey trudge to market. The man succeeds in confiscating his goods, but the peasant's way with words ensures that his subsequent entreaties to the judge get them returned.
A capsule tale: but it's the words. Sparse, sun drenched and sand worn, they make our literature appear verbose.
It's not a long text. But the Ancient Egyptians filled their lines, and the spaces between them, with meaning.
"These poems really are absolutely the equal of anything English literature has to offer," Richard says."Ancient Egyptian poetry is some of the oldest humanity has produced, and it can still speak to us.
"It's quite something to hear the voice of a poet from 4000 years ago speaking to us. Egyptian writing is exotic- but the sheer modernity of it is striking."
The Rosetta Stone and other texts, ultimately, are time machines: a means to travel to a lost civilisation. But the messages they bring are still relevant for today.
"We can never know what a poem verse sounds like," Richard said; "it's one of the great difficulties of translating Ancient Egyptian. But it just looks so supremely beautiful when it's carved on tomb and temple walls. People are fascinated by the Rosetta Stone- because, I think, it shows the possibility of talking with the dead.
"Finally, we are understanding an ancient culture in its own words."