What's The Rosetta Stone?

It's Wednesday, July fifteenth. Two hundred and twenty seven years ago today, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the Egyptian port town of Rosetta knocked down a wall and found a slab of dark stone with writing on it. The writing was in three different scripts, two of which nobody on Earth could read. That stone, which weighs about three quarters of a ton and is roughly the size of a large coffee table, became the key that unlocked a civilization's entire written history after fourteen centuries of silence. You've probably heard the phrase "Rosetta Stone" used as a metaphor. There's a language learning software named after it. People say things like "this is the Rosetta Stone for understanding whatever." But I couldn't have told you what the actual stone was or why it mattered until I looked into it this week, and the story of how it went from a chunk of rock in a demolished wall to the most important archaeological discovery in modern history is worth knowing. Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 with 54,000 soldiers and, in a move that was very Napoleon, 151 scientists, scholars, and artists whose job was to study and document everything they found. In mid-July 1799, a unit of French soldiers was reinforcing Fort Julien near the town of Rashid, which the French called Rosetta, on a branch of the Nile about 35 miles east of Alexandria. While demolishing an old wall inside the fort, they uncovered a slab of dark granodiorite that had been used as building material, probably built into the wall centuries earlier during some previous construction project.

The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard (boo-SHAR), noticed that the stone was covered in text and recognized it might be significant. The top section had hieroglyphics, the ancient Egyptian writing that nobody had been able to read for over a thousand years. The middle section had a different Egyptian script called demotic (deh-MAH-tik), which was the everyday writing of later Egyptian society. The bottom section was ancient Greek, which scholars could read. And all three sections appeared to say the same thing.

That last detail is what made the stone extraordinary. If the Greek text said the same thing as the hieroglyphics, you could use the Greek as a key to figure out what the hieroglyphics meant. Scholars who heard about the discovery assumed it would take about two weeks to crack the code. It took twenty three years. The Greek text was translated quickly and turned out to be a bureaucratic decree from 196 BC, issued by priests in Memphis honoring King Ptolemy the Fifth (TAHL-uh-mee), a Macedonian ruler of Egypt who had reduced taxes and restored order after a period of unrest. As ancient documents go, it was about as exciting as a city council resolution. The importance was never what the stone said. It was the fact that whatever boring thing it said, it said it three times in three different scripts.

The British took the stone from the French after defeating Napoleon in Egypt in 1801, and it's been in the British Museum in London ever since, despite Egypt's repeated requests to have it returned. Plaster casts and copies were distributed to universities across Europe, and scholars immediately went to work trying to use the Greek to decode the hieroglyphics.

The first real progress came from Thomas Young, an English physicist who was working on the stone as what he called "the amusement of a few leisure hours." Young focused on the cartouches, the oval shapes that enclosed certain groupings of hieroglyphic symbols, and figured out that they spelled out royal names phonetically. He matched one cartouche to the name Ptolemy from the Greek text and identified several individual hieroglyphic characters by their sounds. But Young couldn't let go of the prevailing assumption that hieroglyphics were fundamentally symbolic, that each picture represented an idea rather than a sound. He believed the script only used phonetic spelling for foreign names like Ptolemy, and that native Egyptian words were written with symbols that represented concepts. He was wrong about that, and the mistake stopped him cold.

The breakthrough came from Jean-François Champollion (zhahn frahn-SWAH shahm-poh-lee-OHN), a French linguist who had been obsessed with Egypt since childhood and had taught himself Coptic, a language descended from ancient Egyptian that was still used in the Coptic Christian Church. Champollion's insight was that hieroglyphics weren't purely symbolic or purely phonetic. They were both, a complex mixture of signs that sometimes represented sounds, sometimes represented whole words, and sometimes served as silent markers that indicated the category of the word being written. Using his knowledge of Coptic, which preserved sounds and grammar from ancient Egyptian but was written in the Greek alphabet, Champollion was able to read the hieroglyphic spellings of Egyptian words, not just foreign names.

On September 14, 1822, Champollion burst into his brother's office in Paris, shouted "I've got it!", and according to family accounts, collapsed and remained unconscious for nearly five days. When he recovered, he presented his findings to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (ah-kah-day-MEE day zan-skrip-see-OHN ay bell LET-ruh) on September 27. For the first time in over fourteen hundred years, a human being could read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Champollion was thirty one years old. He died ten years later at forty one, having spent the remainder of his short life documenting and translating as much of ancient Egypt's written record as he could. The reason the Rosetta Stone matters beyond linguistics is the sheer scale of what it unlocked. Ancient Egypt produced written records for over three thousand years, spanning a civilization that built the pyramids, developed one of the earliest known legal systems, practiced medicine sophisticated enough to perform brain surgery, and created art and architecture that still stands after four millennia. When hieroglyphics fell out of use around 400 AD and the knowledge of how to read them disappeared, all of that written history became inaccessible. Temples covered in inscriptions were surrounded by people who had no idea what the walls said. Scrolls sat in collections across Europe that nobody could read. An entire civilization's voice went silent, not because the records were destroyed but because the language they were written in was forgotten.

Champollion's decipherment reopened that conversation. Within decades, scholars were reading royal decrees, love poems, medical texts, legal contracts, religious hymns, and personal letters written by people who had been dead for thousands of years. The field of Egyptology, which didn't exist before the Rosetta Stone, became one of the most active areas of historical research in the world.

The stone itself is still in the British Museum, Room 4, behind glass, and it's the single most visited object in the collection. Egypt has been requesting its return for years, arguing that it was taken as a spoil of war during a colonial military campaign and belongs in the country where it was made and found. The British Museum has so far declined, citing the stone's importance to its global collection and the museum's role as a universal repository of human culture. Whether you find that argument persuasive probably depends on how you feel about a former colonial power keeping the most important artifact of another country's civilizational heritage in a glass case in London. The debate hasn't been resolved and probably won't be anytime soon.

What's not debatable is what the stone made possible. A slab of rock used as building material in a forgotten wall, covered in a bureaucratic tax decree that nobody would care about on its own merits, turned out to be the key that reopened a three-thousand-year conversation between the modern world and one of the oldest civilizations in human history. The scholars who first saw it thought it would take two weeks to decode. It took twenty three years, one genius who fainted when he figured it out, and the resurrection of a dead language that had been silent for fourteen centuries. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. The Rosetta Stone was found 227 years ago today by French soldiers who pulled it out of a wall they were demolishing near the Egyptian port of Rosetta. It has the same decree written in three scripts: hieroglyphics, demotic Egyptian, and ancient Greek. Because scholars could read the Greek, they could use it as a key to decode the hieroglyphics, which nobody on Earth had been able to read for over 1,400 years. Scholars thought it would take two weeks. It took twenty three years and the work of two brilliant men, Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, who figured out that hieroglyphics were a complex mix of phonetic and symbolic characters. The stone unlocked three thousand years of Egyptian written history that had been sitting in plain sight on temple walls and scrolls that nobody could read. The stone itself is a boring government decree about tax breaks for a king. It's the most important boring document in the history of archaeology, and it's been in the British Museum since 1802 despite Egypt's ongoing requests to get it back.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.