The Rosetta Stone

For more than a thousand years, no one could read the writing of ancient Egypt. The hieroglyphs carved on temples and tombs were clearly a form of writing, but the knowledge of how to read them had been lost by around the fifth century. That began to change in 1799, when French soldiers working near the town of Rosetta, in northern Egypt, found a broken stone covered in writing.

The stone contained the same official message written three times: in hieroglyphs, in a later Egyptian script called Demotic, and in ancient Greek. Because scholars could still read Greek, the stone offered a key to the other two scripts. Even so, the work proved difficult. Many researchers assumed that hieroglyphs were symbols that represented ideas rather than sounds, and this belief hindered their progress for years.

The breakthrough came from the French scholar Jean-François Champollion. He noticed that some hieroglyphs written inside oval shapes spelled out the names of rulers, such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and that these signs stood for sounds. Using this discovery and his knowledge of Coptic, a late form of the Egyptian language, he showed that hieroglyphs combined signs for sounds with signs for ideas. In 1822, he announced that he could read them, and the study of ancient Egypt was transformed.