The Rosetta Stone helped scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs after its discovery in 1799.
French soldiers found the granodiorite stele near the town of Rashid, called Rosetta by Europeans, during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. The stone preserves a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC during the reign of Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek.
Because scholars could already read Ancient Greek, the parallel texts provided a crucial basis for interpreting the Egyptian scripts. Thomas Young made important advances, and Jean-François Champollion announced a major decipherment of hieroglyphic writing in 1822. The stone was captured by British forces and transferred to the British Museum in London in 1802.
The Rosetta Stone did not contain a complete dictionary or single key to every hieroglyph. Its value came from the repeated text in multiple writing systems and from the historical context of the decree. The name “Rosetta Stone” is now also used metaphorically for any breakthrough key to a difficult system.