For about 1,400 years, nobody could read hieroglyphs. The last ones were carved in AD 394, and then the knowledge was lost. You have learned to read cartouches; this stone is how people first learned to read them again.
Key idea
The Rosetta Stone has the same message written three times: in hieroglyphs at the top, in Demotic (a fast everyday Egyptian script) in the middle, and in Greek at the bottom.
Why it works
In 196 BC, Egyptian priests made a decree honoring King Ptolemy V and had it carved in three scripts, so that priests, ordinary Egyptians and the Greek-speaking rulers could all read it. In 1799, French soldiers found the stone near the town of Rosetta. Scholars could still read Greek. So they knew what the hieroglyphs had to say, and could start matching them up.
Worked example: A key to the code
Why was the Greek part so important?
- The three parts say the same thing.
- Scholars could read Greek.
- So the Greek told them what the hieroglyphs meant.
Answer: It let scholars know what the hieroglyphs said, so they could work out the signs.
Common mistake
Thinking the stone is a dictionary. It is one priestly decree from 196 BC, copied in three scripts. It gave clues, not a word list. It took scholars more than twenty years to crack the code.
The stone has been in the British Museum in London since 1802. See it on the Timeline, with the other big moments of Egyptian history.