Archaeology
When was the Rosetta Stone discovered?
1799 AD
The Rosetta Stone was uncovered at Fort Julien near Rashid in mid-July 1799 AD.
1 BC · 1 AD
Context
What happened?
Soldiers on Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign found the inscribed slab while demolishing a wall inside the fort, a couple of miles north-east of the port Europeans then called Rosetta. Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard recognised that the inscriptions mattered and had the stone sent to Cairo.
Significance
Why it matters
The same decree appears on the stone in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek script, which gave scholars a route into a writing system nobody had read for centuries. Building on work by Thomas Young, Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment in Paris in 1822.
Further reading
Sources
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