Discovery of the Rosetta Stone

Background. Led by Napoleon, the French Army of the Orient invaded Egypt in 1798. By mid-July 1799, French soldiers under Colonel d'Hautpoul were strengthening the defences of Fort Julien, a couple of miles north-east of the Egyptian port city of Rosetta, modern-day Rashid. It was there, in July 1799, that the stone was found.

The Stone Itself. The object was a stele of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes: hieroglyphic and Demotic texts in Ancient Egyptian, and Ancient Greek below. A contemporary catalogue of artefacts discovered by the French expedition described it as a stone of black granodiorite bearing three inscriptions, found at Rosetta.

Immediate Significance. The decree's three versions have only minor differences, making the stone key to deciphering the Egyptian scripts. Recognition in 1799 that it offered three versions of the same text was the first major advance in decoding, and the discovery provided critical missing information that eventually allowed Champollion to solve the riddle of Egyptian hieroglyphs.