The Rosetta Stone

Dug out of the wall of a fort in 1799 by a soldier in Napoleon’s army near Rosetta, in the Nile River delta, this Hellenistic inscription in two different languages and three different forms of writing unlocked the lost secrets of how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. The bands of text repeat the same message (priests praising King Ptolemy V in 196 B.C.E.) in hieroglyphs, demotic (a cursive form of Egyptian invented around 600 B.C.E.), and Greek. Bilingual texts were necessary to reach the mixed population of Hellenistic Egypt. Scholars deciphered the hieroglyphs by comparing them to the Greek version. They started with the hieroglyphs surrounded by an oval, which they guessed were royal names. (Art Resource, NY.)