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The Rosetta Stone's Decisive Role

Discovered in 1799 by French soldiers in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stone slab that has become an icon of archaeology. Its importance does not stem from the text itself, which is a decree passed by a council of priests in 196 BC to honor King Ptolemy V of Egypt. Instead, its immense value lies in the fact that the decree is inscribed in three different scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cursive script known as Demotic, and Ancient Greek.

For nearly 1,400 years after the last known use of hieroglyphs, the ancient Egyptian writing system was indecipherable. Scholars could see the inscriptions on monuments throughout Egypt but had no way of understanding them. The Rosetta Stone provided the critical key. Since Ancient Greek was a well-understood language, scholars could use the Greek text as a guide to unlock the other two scripts. The final breakthrough was made by the French philologist Jean-François Champollion in the 1820s. He was able to deduce the phonetic values of many hieroglyphs by comparing the proper names, like "Ptolemy," which appeared in all three texts.

The decipherment of the Rosetta Stone had a transformative effect on our understanding of ancient history. It unlocked a wealth of information from thousands of previously unreadable documents, from monumental inscriptions to personal letters written on papyrus. For the first time, historians could read about ancient Egyptian religion, society, law, and history directly from the Egyptians' own records. This moved the study of ancient Egypt from one based on speculation and the accounts of foreign travelers to one founded on primary source evidence, giving a voice to a civilization that had been silent for millennia.