The Rosetta Stone is found

French soldiers found a stone slab carved with the same decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Scholars used the Greek to decode hieroglyphs, a feat completed by Champollion in the 1820s.

Context

The stone was found in July 1799 at Fort Julien near the town of Rashid, called Rosetta by Europeans, during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. It was reused as building material in the fort, so its original location is unknown.

The text is a decree issued in 196 BCE for the Egyptian king Ptolemy V, recording honors given by priests. Because it was written in three scripts, scholars could compare a known language with two they could not read.

After the French defeat, the stone passed to Britain under the 1801 surrender terms and has been in the British Museum since 1802. Thomas Young made early progress on royal names, and Jean-Francois Champollion announced his breakthrough in 1822, showing that hieroglyphs combined sound signs with signs for ideas.

The stone is broken, and the hieroglyphic section is the most damaged. Decipherment relied on other texts too, but the stone gave the key starting point.

Its importance is that it opened Egyptian writing across thousands of years of temple and tomb texts, and the phrase Rosetta Stone is now used for any key to a hard problem.