What ancient artifact was discovered by Napoleon's soldiers in Egypt in 1799?

Napoleon’s soldiers discovered the Rosetta Stone in Egypt in 1799.

The discovery occurred in July 1799 while French troops were strengthening Fort Julien near the town of Rosetta, now called Rashid, in the Nile Delta. Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard noticed the inscribed stone in a wall being demolished. The artifact was reported to the Institut d’Égypte, the scholarly organization Napoleon had established alongside his military expedition.

The stone is a granodiorite stele bearing the same decree in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek. The decree was issued in 196 BC during the reign of Ptolemy V. Because scholars could read Greek, the parallel texts eventually helped Jean-François Champollion decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s.

The Rosetta Stone was not a statue or a complete Egyptian monument, and it was not discovered inside a pyramid. It was reused as building material in a fort. After the French surrender in 1801, the stone passed into British possession and was taken to London. It has been displayed at the British Museum since 1802, where it became one of the world’s best-known archaeological objects.