The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone, inscribed in 196 BC with a priestly decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek script, now in the British Museum.
French soldiers fortifying a fort near the town of Rosetta during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign uncovered this granodiorite slab in 1799; after Napoleon's forces surrendered in 1801, it passed to Britain under the terms of capitulation. Because the same decree was carved in three scripts, scholars had a way in: the French philologist Jean-François Champollion used the Greek text and the repeated royal name "Ptolemy" to crack the hieroglyphic system in 1822, after more than a decade of competing attempts. The breakthrough opened three thousand years of Egyptian inscriptions to modern readers for the first time since antiquity.
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