Rosetta Stone Found: Key to Deciphering Hieroglyphs

A French soldier digging fortifications near the Egyptian port town of Rashid stumbled upon a dark slab of granodiorite on July 19, 1799, and inadvertently handed scholars the key to an entire lost civilization. The Rosetta Stone, as it came to be known, contained the same royal decree inscribed in three scripts, and it would take two decades of obsessive work before anyone could read it. The stone dates to 196 BC and bears a decree issued at Memphis on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The text appears in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top, Demotic script in the middle, and Ancient Greek at the bottom. Because scholars could already read Greek, the stone offered the tantalizing possibility of working backward to crack the hieroglyphic code that had been impenetrable for over a thousand years. Pierre-Francois Bouchard, the officer who recognized the stone's significance, reported the discovery to his superiors during Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign. French scholars made copies and plaster casts before British forces defeated the French in 1801 and claimed the stone under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria. The British shipped it to London, where it has remained in the British Museum since 1802 as the institution's most visited object. The race to decipher the hieroglyphs consumed Europe's finest minds. Thomas Young, an English polymath, made critical early breakthroughs by identifying that some hieroglyphic signs represented sounds rather than whole words. But the full decipherment belongs to Jean-Francois Champollion, a French linguist who had studied Coptic, the descendant language of ancient Egyptian. In 1822, Champollion announced that hieroglyphs were a complex system combining phonetic and ideographic elements, unlocking three thousand years of Egyptian history that had been unreadable. An empire's administrative paperwork, recovered from a crumbling fort, became the single most important artifact in the history of archaeology.