The Rosetta Stone used Demotic for its third inscription alongside Ancient Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The text is one decree issued in 196 BCE during the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes.
Demotic was the administrative and everyday written form of Egyptian used in the later period of ancient Egyptian history. On the stone, it appears between the hieroglyphic text at the top and the Greek text at the bottom.
The three versions conveyed the same decree, allowing scholars to compare the known Greek text with the two Egyptian scripts. This parallel structure was crucial to the decipherment of Egyptian writing, although the process required years of analysis rather than a single instant breakthrough.
The stone was found in 1799 near the Egyptian town of Rashid, known in European languages as Rosetta, during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. Jean-François Champollion announced a major breakthrough in reading hieroglyphs in 1822.