Soldiers discovered the Rosetta Stone in Egypt
On this day · 15 July 1799
On July 15, 1799, French soldiers building a fort in Egypt unearthed a stone whose three scripts would crack the code of hieroglyphs.
On July 15, 1799, French soldiers reinforcing a fort near the port of Rosetta (Rashid) in Egypt uncovered a slab of dark stone built into an old wall. The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, recognized that the inscriptions might matter, and the discovery was preserved as Napoleon’s army worked through the country.
The stone carried a single priestly decree of 196 BCE written three times, in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphic, everyday Demotic, and Greek. Because scholars could still read ancient Greek, the parallel texts offered a key to a script that had been silent for centuries.
Three versions of the same words turned an unreadable language back into a readable one.
Decipherment still took decades; Jean-François Champollion published his breakthrough in 1822. Surrendered to Britain in 1801, the Rosetta Stone reached the British Museum in 1802, where it remains the most visited object on display.
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