Three writing systems appear on the Rosetta Stone.
The stone contains the same decree in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. The decree was issued in 196 BCE during the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, and the repeated text allowed scholars to compare the known Greek with the Egyptian scripts.
French soldiers discovered the granodiorite stele near the town of Rashid, called Rosetta by Europeans, in 1799 during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. British forces captured it in 1801, and it was transferred to the British Museum, where it has been displayed since 1802.
Jean-François Champollion announced a major breakthrough in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822. The stone was not the only evidence he used, but its parallel inscriptions were crucial. “Demotic” refers to a later Egyptian script used for everyday and administrative writing, while hieroglyphs were used in monumental contexts.