Where French soldiers found the Rosetta Stone in 1799, the key to reading hieroglyphs.
Where
The town of Rashid on the western (Rosetta) branch of the Nile, near the sea
When
The stone was carved in 196 BC; it was found in July 1799
What
A broken slab of granodiorite, 112.3 cm high, with one decree in three scripts
Now
The British Museum, London (on show there since 1802)
Who built what
Rosetta is not an ancient temple site at all. In July 1799, during Napoleon's expedition, French soldiers rebuilding an old fort near the town (they called it Fort Julien) found a dark stone built into a wall. Pierre-François Bouchard, the officer in charge, saw that it carried three kinds of writing and had it sent to the scholars in Cairo.
The stone itself came from somewhere else. It is a copy of a decree passed by a council of priests at Memphis in 196 BC, in honor of the young king Ptolemy V, and copies were meant to be set up in temples all over Egypt. This one probably stood in a temple in the Delta (Sais has been suggested) before it was reused as building stone.
What survives
The upper part is broken away, so only the last 14 lines of the hieroglyphic text survive; the Demotic text has 32 lines and the Greek 54. Because the Greek could be read, scholars knew what the Egyptian texts said. Thomas Young showed that one oval ring (cartouche) held the name Ptolemy and read some of its signs, and in 1822 Jean-François Champollion showed how the whole system worked: sound signs and word signs together.
When the French surrendered in 1801, the stone passed to the British under the Treaty of Alexandria. It has been in the British Museum since 1802. Whether objects like this should go back to Egypt is debated; the Archaeology course sets out both sides.
The stone's three texts and how many lines of each survive.
Inscriptions
2 short, well-known texts from Rosetta, each with its transliteration (the Egyptian sounds in Latin letters) and a translation. Tap Sign by sign to see what each sign is and how it is read. Royal names are drawn in their cartouches.
The cartouche of Ptolemy
Transliteration
ptwlmys ꜥnḫ ḏt mrj ptḥ
Translation
“Ptolemy, living forever, beloved of Ptah”
Where: Several times in the hieroglyphic lines, always in a cartouche.
This is the name Thomas Young matched with "Ptolemaios" in the Greek text, the first step in the decipherment. The Greek name is spelled out sound by sound: p, t, o (the lasso), l (the lion), m, y and s. The words after it are a royal epithet; Ptah, the god of Memphis, is written before the word "beloved" out of honor but read after it.
Simplified: The signs are the standard ones, set in one line. On the stone the cartouche is grouped more tightly, and the land sign of ḏt "forever" is a flatter form (Gardiner N17).
Sign by sign
Reading: The standard reading, as in the Wikipedia article "Rosetta Stone" and Parkinson, Cracking Codes (1999).
The decree's last line: three kinds of writing
Several signs in this line (the scribe's kit, the staff of mdw "words") are not yet in the site's hieroglyph font, so it is given in transliteration only.
Transliteration
sẖ n mdw-nṯr sẖ n šꜥt sẖ n ḥꜣw-nbw
Translation
“(to be written) in the writing of the god's words, the writing of documents, and the writing of the Greeks”
Where: The last line of the hieroglyphic section, just above the Demotic.
The priests ordered the decree to be carved in three scripts: hieroglyphs (the "god's words"), Demotic (the everyday script of documents) and Greek, the language of the government. The stone obeys its own instructions, which is why it could unlock the other two.
Reading: The standard reading; the Wikipedia article "Rosetta Stone" gives the three names in English. ḥꜣw-nbw, an old word for the peoples of the north, meant the Greeks by this time.
Dates follow Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000); before 664 BC they are approximate. Readings are the standard ones in the sources named under each inscription; translations are Teddy Rook Book's own. The hieroglyphs are drawn in the site's font, TRB Hieroglyphs, so their shapes are simplified; where an inscription's arrangement or signs can't be shown faithfully, the card says so.