The Rosetta Stone helped scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs through the same decree written in three scripts.
The stone bears a decree issued in 196 BC during the reign of Ptolemy V. Its text appears in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the demotic script used for everyday Egyptian writing, and Ancient Greek. Because scholars could read Greek, the parallel versions provided a crucial key for interpreting the Egyptian scripts.
French soldiers discovered the stone near Rashid, known in European languages as Rosetta, in 1799 during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. Jean-François Champollion announced a major decipherment breakthrough in 1822, building on earlier work by Thomas Young and other scholars.
The stone is made of granodiorite, not black basalt as it is sometimes described. It has been in the British Museum since 1802, apart from periods when it was moved for safety, and it remains one of the museum’s best-known objects.