The Rosetta Stone

For centuries, nobody could read Egyptian hieroglyphs. The last known inscription had been carved in the fourth century, and the knowledge of how to read the script was lost. The temples and tombs were covered in writing that no one could understand.

Then a stone was found that changed this.

The discovery#

In 1799, during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, found a large slab of dark stone. It carried the same text written three times, in three scripts.

The text was a decree issued in 196 BC, on behalf of the young king Ptolemy V. The three versions were in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in a cursive Egyptian script called Demotic, and in ancient Greek.

Why it was so useful#

Scholars could still read Greek. So they had a version of the text they understood, and next to it, the same message in scripts they could not. In principle, the Greek could act as a key.

In practice, it took more than twenty years.

The decipherment#

Several scholars worked on it. The English polymath Thomas Young made early progress, showing that some signs spelled out names. The breakthrough came from the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, who announced in 1822 that hieroglyphs were not just pictures or symbols, but a mixture: some signs represented sounds and some represented ideas.

His knowledge of Coptic, a late form of the Egyptian language, was crucial.

Where it is now#

The stone passed into British hands after the French defeat in Egypt, and it has been displayed at the British Museum since 1802. Egypt has requested its return, and the question of where it belongs is still debated.

What it teaches#

A key often comes from an unexpected place. The same message, written three ways, gave people a bridge between what they knew and what they did not. The same trick works whenever you learn something new: start from what you understand and find a way across.