Read an Academic Passage

The History of the Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous archaeological discoveries in history. Discovered in 1799 by a French soldier in the Egyptian village of Rosetta, this slab of black granodiorite provided the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stone is inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. What makes it unique is that the same text is inscribed in three different scripts: hieroglyphic, used for important religious documents; Demotic, the common script of everyday life in ancient Egypt; and ancient Greek.

For centuries, scholars had been unable to understand hieroglyphs, the pictorial writing system of ancient Egypt. The presence of the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone was crucial because ancient Greek was well understood by scholars of the early 19th century. They could read the Greek portion and correctly assumed that the three scripts contained the same message. This assumption provided a starting point for decoding the other two mysterious scripts.

The decipherment was a long and collaborative process, but the final breakthrough is credited to the French scholar Jean-François Champollion in 1822. He meticulously compared the scripts, focusing on the cartouches, or oval loops, in the hieroglyphic text, which he correctly hypothesized contained the names of royal figures. By matching the phonetic sounds of the Greek names, like Ptolemy, with the hieroglyphic symbols in the cartouches, he unlocked the phonetic values of many hieroglyphs. This discovery opened up the entire world of ancient Egyptian history, literature, and culture, which had been silent for nearly two millennia.