Which artifact helped scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs?

The Rosetta Stone helped scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Discovered near Rashid, Egypt, in 1799 during Napoleon’s campaign, the stone carries the same decree in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek. Because scholars could already read Greek, the parallel text provided a crucial route into the other scripts.

Thomas Young made important advances, including recognizing that some hieroglyphs represented sounds in royal names. Jean-François Champollion built on this work and announced a major decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.

The surviving stone is incomplete, so it did not provide a perfect word-for-word translation of every symbol. Its importance came from the repeated text and the combination of scripts. The decree was issued in 196 BCE during the reign of Ptolemy V, more than a thousand years after hieroglyphic writing first developed.