The Rosetta Stone: How a Slab in a French Fort Unlocked Egypt's Hieroglyphs

In the middle of July 1799, French soldiers were tearing down an old wall at a crumbling fort outside the port of Rashid, where a branch of the Nile meets the Mediterranean. Their general wanted the defences strengthened against a British or Ottoman landing.

Among the rubble was a heavy slab of dark stone, broken at the top and one corner. One face was covered in tiny, careful lines of writing. The officer on duty, Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard, could see that there were three different kinds of script on it, and that the lowest one was Greek.

Nobody alive could read the other two. For more than 1,400 years, no one had been able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs at all.

A wall at Fort Julien

Napoleon Bonaparte had invaded Egypt in 1798, bringing with him not only an army but more than 150 scholars, engineers and artists. When word of the find reached them, they understood at once what it might mean. A report read at their new institute in Cairo on 19 July 1799 suggested that the three inscriptions were versions of the same text.

If that was true, the Greek could act as a crib. Anyone who could match its words to the Egyptian signs above might finally break the old script.

The scholars set about copying it. One of them, the inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté, found a way to ink the stone itself and press paper onto it like a printing block. By 1800 prints of the inscriptions were on their way to Paris, and Europe's scholars could start work.

Spoils of war

The French did not keep the stone. Napoleon slipped back to France in August 1799, and in 1801 a British and Ottoman force landed in Egypt and defeated his remaining army. General Jacques-François Menou surrendered at Alexandria on 30 August 1801.

A dispute followed over the collections the French had gathered. Menou tried to claim the stone as his private property. Accounts differ on how it was handed over: one British officer later said he had seized it from Menou and carried it off on a gun carriage, while another described finding it hidden under carpets among Menou's baggage.

Either way, the stone sailed for England on a captured French frigate and landed at Portsmouth in February 1802. King George III directed that it go to the British Museum. White painted lines on its sides still read "Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801" and "Presented by King George III".

What the stone actually says

The slab is about 112 centimetres high, 76 centimetres wide and 28 centimetres thick, and weighs around 760 kilograms. It is granodiorite, not basalt as was long thought, probably quarried near Aswan in southern Egypt.

It is the lower part of a larger stele, a standing inscribed stone that probably had a rounded top and a carved scene. Comparison with similar monuments suggests it was once about 1.5 metres tall.

The text is a decree issued by a council of priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 BC. Egypt was then ruled by the Ptolemies, a Greek-speaking dynasty founded by one of Alexander the Great's generals. The king, Ptolemy V, had come to the throne as a small child amid murder, revolt and war, and had been crowned at about 12.

The decree praises him for gifts of silver and grain to the temples, for tax relief and for controlling a high Nile flood. In return the priests promised to honour him as a god in every temple. A copy was to be set up in each temple in three scripts: the "language of the gods" (hieroglyphs), the "language of documents" (Demotic, the everyday Egyptian script) and Greek.

Only 14 lines of the hieroglyphs survive, all broken. The Demotic section has 32 lines and the Greek 54.

The race to read it

The Greek was read and translated quickly. The Egyptian was much harder. Many scholars assumed hieroglyphs were symbols for ideas, not sounds, partly because of a misleading ancient guide written in the 5th century AD.

The Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad and the French scholar Silvestre de Sacy made progress with the Demotic in 1802, identifying names such as Ptolemy. In 1814 the British scientist Thomas Young, already known for his work on light, turned to the stone. He showed that the oval rings called cartouches spelled out the royal name Ptolemy using signs that stood for sounds. He also found many links between the Demotic and the hieroglyphs. He set out his ideas in a long article on Egypt for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1819.

Young believed, however, that sound-signs were used mainly for foreign names. The man who went further was Jean-François Champollion, a young scholar from Grenoble who had studied Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, since his teens.

The breakthrough of 1822

In 1822 Champollion compared the Rosetta cartouches with the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra on an obelisk from Philae. Matching the shared letters let him build an alphabet of sound-signs. Soon he found that the same signs spelled the names of much older native pharaohs, such as Ramesses and Thutmose, in copies of inscriptions from Abu Simbel. Hieroglyphs, he realised, mixed sound-signs with picture-signs, in Egyptian words as well as foreign ones.

On 27 September 1822 he presented his results to the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris, in a paper written as a letter to its secretary, Bon-Joseph Dacier. Over the next decade he produced a grammar and a dictionary of ancient Egyptian. He died in 1832, aged 41.

Rivals and legends

The decipherment quickly became a matter of national pride. British writers accused Champollion of failing to credit Young, and French writers played down Young's role. Both men died young, Young in 1829, and the argument outlived them. Most historians now see Young as a key pioneer and Champollion as the one who cracked the system.

The best-known story about the moment of discovery is that Champollion ran to his brother's office, cried "I've got it!" and collapsed for several days. It comes from family tradition and later retellings, so it is best treated as a good story rather than established fact.

Where it is now

The Rosetta Stone has been on display at the British Museum almost continuously since 1802, and the museum says it is its most visited object. During heavy bombing raids on London in 1917, it was moved for two years to a station of the Post Office's underground railway near Holborn. Apart from wartime, it has left the museum only once, for a month at the Louvre in October 1972.

A cleaning in 1999 removed the wax and white chalk added in the 19th century to make the text readable, revealing the stone's dark grey colour and a pink vein across one corner.

Egypt has asked for it back. In 2003, Zahi Hawass, then head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, called it an icon of Egyptian identity and requested its return, and calls have continued since. The museum gave Egypt a full-size replica in 2005, which is displayed in Rashid, a short distance from where the original came out of the wall.

Other copies of the same decree have since been found, so the Rosetta Stone is not unique. But it was the first one found, and it arrived at exactly the moment when scholars were ready to use it. A slab reused as building rubble gave the modern world back the voice of ancient Egypt.