Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a granodiorite stele inscribed in 196 BC with a decree issued at Memphis by a council of Egyptian priests affirming the cult of the thirteen-year-old pharaoh Ptolemy V. Its significance rests almost entirely on how it was made, not on the decree's own content: the same text is carved three times, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic script, and Ancient Greek, which let scholars use the known Greek to work out the long-lost hieroglyphic writing system. Rediscovered in 1799 by French soldiers near the town of Rosetta (Rashid) during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, it passed to British possession under the 1801 Capitulation of Alexandria and has been displayed in the British Museum since 1802, becoming the single most-visited object in the museum's collection. Jean-Francois Champollion's decipherment of the hieroglyphic text in 1822, building on earlier work by Thomas Young, opened the whole of ancient Egyptian writing to modern scholarship and made the stone the founding artifact of Egyptology.