For centuries, scholars puzzled over the hieroglyphs they found carved onto ancient Egyptian ruins, tablets, and papyri.
But a unique discovery would finally help unlock their meaning.
In 1799, as the French military invaded Egypt, an officer encountered a curious stone on the outskirts of Rashid, or Rosetta.
It was inscribed with three different portions of text: Egyptian hieroglyphs, which is the oldest Egyptian script, dating back some 5,000 years; Demotic Egyptian, which is a later derivative of Egyptian; and Ancient Greek.
It seemed that each section was a rough translation of the others, meaning the stone presented an unprecedented key to unlocking hieroglyphs.
English troops soon intercepted the stone and brought it to the British Museum in 1802, where it became one of the most popular displays.
Various European scholars— including Johan Åkerblad, Thomas Young, and Jean-François Champollion— worked to decode the Egyptian scripts.
There were some crucial initial clues.
The Greek section included the names of royal figures, while certain areas in the Demotic section had bracket-like forms and some hieroglyphic sections were encircled.
Could these portions encode the same royal names?
