Rosetta Stone Found: Key to Deciphering Hieroglyphs
A French engineering officer named Pierre-Francois Bouchard was supervising the demolition of a wall at Fort Julien near Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt, on July 19, 1799, when he noticed a large black basalt slab covered in inscriptions. The stone bore the same decree in three scripts: Ancient Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphic. For centuries, no one had been able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Greek text provided the key. Thomas Young made early progress, but it was Jean-Francois Champollion who cracked the code in 1822, realizing hieroglyphs represented sounds rather than ideas. The Rosetta Stone unlocked an entire civilization, making 3,000 years of Egyptian history readable for the first time.
July 19, 1799
227 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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