The stone that spoke: How a discovery on this day in 1799 unlocked Ancient Egypt’s secrets

Today, Tuesday 15 July, marks 226 years since the discovery of an ancient artifact that transformed the way that we understand the ancient world.

The Rosetta Stone was found in the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta in July 1799. The stela was discovered by Pierre-Francois Bouchard, a French officer who was traveling the area during the Napoleonic campaign. It was the first example of an Ancient Egypt text found in modern times and it was to prove one of the most important historical breakthroughs.

The artifact is a large slab of stone that contains a decree issued in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. What makes the finding so important is that the same message was repeated three times, in hieroglyphics, Demotic script and Ancient Greek.

Researchers believe that there are only very slight differences between the three versions of the text, making it a crucial tool in dechipering other texts from the time. However, for those early researchers it was not easy.

The British defeated the French soon after its discovery and the stone was taken to London in 1801, and since 1902 it has been on public display at the British Museum. The following year scholars were able to publish a first full translation of the Greek text, but it wasn’t until decades later that there was widespread agreement about the inscriptions in Ancient Egyptian.

The stone that was found is 44.2in x 29.8in x 11.2in, although this is only one part of the initial structure. Historians believes that what has been found represents just the bottom two-third of the original stela. The hieroglyphic section at the top is the worst-damaged, with less that half of the original pieces still legible in the remaining fragment.

But despite that, the Rosette Stone is one of the most important archaeological finds of all times, a single object that helped to unlock the meaning of hieroglyphics, a language that had been considered ‘dead’ for nearly 2,000 years.

Historian Joe Janes of the UW Information Schoool said of the Rosetta Stone: “A message for the ages deserves a medium for the ages, though sometimes the medium can outlast the message.”

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