In July 1799, a French army led by General Napoleon Bonaparte was in Egypt with ambitions to establish a colonial foothold. Troops prepared fortifications across the country, and a key project fell to military engineer Pierre Bouchard, who supervised restoration at Fort Julien near Rosetta in the Nile Delta.
While repairing the wall, a broken stone caught his eye. One side bore inscriptions that looked remarkably unusual.
Bouchard was a scientist and a member of the Commission of Science and Art that accompanied the expedition to study this ancient land, then barely known to Europeans. Archaeology was a priority for the mission, so he reported the discovery and handed the stone over for examination.
On July 19, 1799, commissioner Michel Lancret filed a brief report describing three texts: the top line in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle in a script resembling Syriac, and the bottom in ancient Greek, likely the same text rendered in three forms.
Soon after, linguists on the expedition realized that the middle text, like the upper one, was Egyptian but in a demotic script — a cursive, simplified writing system used in everyday life. The Rosetta Stone would later become the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian texts.
Egyptian civilization did not leave obvious heirs or living carriers of its culture. The Coptic people trace their descent to ancient Egyptians, yet after the Arab conquest they largely abandoned their own alphabet and language, which gradually faded. Writing in hieroglyphs disappeared much earlier, near the close of the fourth century when Roman Emperor Theodosius I closed pagan temples and dispersed the last priests, guardians of arcane knowledge.
In 1801, the British defeated French forces in Egypt and began laying siege to their last stronghold, Alexandria. As surrender talks began, Britain sought to seize all ancient Egyptian artifacts to advance historical research and national prestige.
The French argued for the protection of scholarly work, proposing that antiquities and research materials be recognized as the scientists’ personal property. A compromise followed: the French handed over 17 of the most important finds but kept the rest, including notes and drawings. The Rosetta Stone itself was secretly moved to the British army to prevent theft, eventually ending up in the British Museum, where it remains today. Scientifically, France did not lose much; a copy of the text was delivered to Paris.
Decoding
In modern times, Egyptian writings have often carried an aura of mysticism. Some believed papyrus texts held sacred secrets, while others thought symbols carried magical meaning. This atmosphere was sometimes exploited by con artists.
For instance, Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon movement, claimed a translation of a book attributed to the biblical patriarch Abraham from ancient Egyptian sources. Later scholarship showed that the so-called original was a common funerary text from ancient Egypt, intended to assist the deceased in the afterlife, and that the Book of Abraham drew on familiar biblical material with embellishments from Smith’s imagination.
Yet the Rosetta Stone’s gift to humanity goes far beyond debunking frauds. It opened a portal to the ancient world. The decipherment journey took decades because the text posed intricate puzzles. Early scholars spoke ancient Greek and could, in principle, read the inscription beneath, yet the language differed from biblical Greek and classical philosophy, and bureaucratic terminology added to the hurdle.
For a long time, researchers could not identify individual signs in the demotic script, and the main focus remained on the hieroglyphic text, the key to the mystery.
At first, linguists clung to the notion that each hieroglyph stood for a word. A glancing acquaintance with Chinese characters helped Sylvester de Sacy recognize that Egyptians often encoded foreign names phonetically, syllable by syllable, not pictorially. Researchers also noted that certain hieroglyphs were enclosed in cartouches, indicating names in a legal or ceremonial context.
That observation, paired with the cartouche idea, led Thomas Young to a breakthrough. He began to decipher by locating cartouches, spotting Greek names, and identifying phonetic signs. Young’s work revealed the phonetic record of Ptolemy and showed how signs in demotic writing linked to hieroglyphs, suggesting a shared phonetic system.
Young’s progress stalled, but in 1814 he shared ideas with Jean-FransChampollion, who would later gain fame for deciphering Egyptian scripts. Eight years later, Champollion saw a hieroglyphic inscription on a stele that included the name Cleopatra and the word Ptolemy, triggering a breakthrough.
Champollion realized that some signs in cartouches corresponded phonemically to Greek sounds. He demonstrated that the same signs could function phonically, symbolically, and figuratively within the same text. This insight unlocked many royal names and opened a path to the study of Egyptian chronology and governance.
The Rosetta Stone’s decisive role ended there. The hieroglyphic text on the stone was partly damaged, and later decipherment relied on a wider corpus of papyri. Today, linguists can read ancient Egyptian languages, though the scarcity of surviving inscriptions keeps decipherment challenging.
Long live our great pharaoh
Regardless of its historical impact, the Rosetta Stone inscription itself is surprisingly sober. It dates to 196 BCE, carved in Memphis during a time of Greek influence, and records gratitude to the new ruler, Ptolemy V, in ceremonial language.
“His Majesty, King of the South and the North Ptolemy, the ever-living, beloved Bird, the self-manifested god, the lord of beauty, received supreme power from his father…” the text begins, listing royal deeds and temple gifts, tax relief, debt forgiveness, and amnesty for prisoners. It also notes that boatmen would not be drafted for the navy, and it describes measures to protect the canals during the Nile’s seasonal floods. The decree extols the king’s governance and achievements.
Because the new king was generous, priests promised annual celebrations of his birth and coronation and vowed to worship him alongside the gods. The text concludes with a request to copy the inscription into temple walls in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek, reflecting administrative reach across Egypt.
In short, mystics and romantics often found the text underwhelming, seeing it as no more entertaining than tax records or civil service paperwork.