What town in Egypt gave the Rosetta Stone its European name?

The town of Rosetta in Egypt gave the Rosetta Stone its European name.

The stone was discovered in 1799 by soldiers in Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition near the town, whose Arabic name is رشيد, commonly transliterated as Rashid. European languages rendered that name as Rosetta, so the inscribed slab became known as the Rosetta Stone.

Its text repeats the same decree in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. Because scholars could read Ancient Greek, the parallel inscriptions helped unlock the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Jean-François Champollion announced a major breakthrough in decipherment in 1822.

The stone is made of granodiorite and dates to 196 BCE, during the reign of Ptolemy V. British forces captured it in 1801, and it has been displayed at the British Museum since 1802. The stone is a key to decipherment, but Egyptian writing was understood through years of comparative scholarship rather than from the object alone.