The Rosetta Stone
Three Scripts, One Decree, and the Deciphering of Hieroglyphs
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The stone's history includes its seizure by British forces after the French defeat in 1801. Chapters detail how Jean-François Champollion used the Greek portion to crack the hieroglyphic code. The book covers the Memphis decree context and explains how each script contributed to understanding ancient Egyptian civilization.
Scholars debate the stone's rightful display in Britain versus Egypt. This account traces the rivalry between French and British researchers, examines repatriation requests, and explores how the phrase "Rosetta Stone" entered common usage. History buffs and anyone curious about ancient languages will find this a compelling read.
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The Rosetta Stone is a black granodiorite slab bearing three inscriptions found at Rosetta, listed in a French expedition catalogue from 1801. After arriving in London, the inscriptions were whitened with chalk to improve legibility, and the surface was coated with carnauba wax to protect it from visitors’ fingers. This gave the stone a dark appearance that led people to mistakenly call it black basalt. When cleaned in 1999, the original grey color and crystalline sparkle were revealed, along with a pink vein in the top left corner. Comparisons with Egyptian rock samples showed it closely matched granodiorite from Gebel Tingar, west of Elephantine in Aswan.
The Rosetta Stone stands about three feet eight inches tall and weighs roughly 1,680 pounds. It’s inscribed with three different scripts: hieroglyphs on top, Demotic in the middle, and Ancient Greek at the bottom. The hieroglyphic text is in a form of Middle Egyptian that had been out of use for centuries, specifically a formal, archaic version called neo-Middle Egyptian, while the Demotic script reflects the spoken Egyptian of the Ptolemaic period. The front of the stone is smooth and polished, with the writing carved just deep enough to be seen, whereas the back was only roughly shaped since it wouldn’t have been visible when the stone was first erected.
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The Rosetta Stone is a piece of a bigger stone that once stood in a temple at Rosetta, Egypt. No other parts of this same stele have ever been found in the area. Because it's broken and worn, none of the three languages written on it—hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek—is whole. The top part, in hieroglyphs, is the most damaged; only the final 14 lines are left, and they’re torn on the right side, with 12 also ruined on the left. Below that, the demotic text is better preserved, with 32 lines, though the first 14 have slight damage on the right. The bottom section in Greek has 54 lines, with the first 27 intact, but the rest are broken off due to a diagonal crack near the lower right corner of the stone.
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After King Ptolemy V was crowned, a decree was written and inscribed on a stele to establish a divine cult for the new ruler. The decree came from a meeting of priests in Memphis, dated 27 March 196 BC—4 Xandikos in the Macedonian calendar and 18 Mekhir in the Egyptian. This was the ninth year of Ptolemy V's rule, confirmed by naming four priests who served that year. Aetos son of Aetos held the position of priest for the divine cults of Alexander the Great and the five Ptolemies up to Ptolemy V. The other three named priests led worship of Berenice Euergetis, Arsinoe Philadelphos, and Arsinoe Philopator. Another date appears in the Greek and hieroglyphic texts—27 November 197 BC, marking the official anniversary of Ptolemy's coronation. But the demotic text lists consecutive days in March for both the decree and the anniversary, creating a conflict. Still, the purpose was clear: to re-establish Ptolemaic rule over Egypt.
The decree came from a time of chaos in Egypt. Ptolemy V Epiphanes ruled from 204 to 181 B.C., but he was just five years old when he took the throne after his parents were killed in a plot involving his mother’s mistress, Agathoclea. The conspirators took control, ruling as guardians until a rebellion erupted two years later. General Tlepolemus led the revolt, and Agathoclea and her family were killed by a mob in Alexandria. Then, in 201 B.C., Aristomenes of Alyzia replaced Tlepolemus as guardian, and he was the chief minister when the Memphis decree was issued.
While Ptolemy V was still a child, Egypt faced growing challenges from foreign powers that worsened internal struggles. Antiochus III the Great and Philip V of Macedon had agreed in secret to divide Egypt’s overseas territories. Philip seized control of several islands and cities in Caria and Thrace, while the Battle of Panium in 198 BC resulted in the Seleucids gaining Coele-Syria, including Judaea. To the south, a major revolt erupted during the reign of Ptolemy IV, led first by Horwennefer and later by his successor Ankhwennefer. Both conflict and rebellion continued when the young Ptolemy V was officially crowned at Memphis at age 12—seven years after he had begun to rule—and just over a year later, the Memphis decree was issued.
In Ptolemaic Egypt, it was unusual for temples to establish decrees rather than the king himself. This practice reflected Greek customs, where subjects honored rulers through collective action. The decree recorded that Ptolemy V gave silver and grain to the temples. It noted that in the eighth year of his reign, there was exceptionally high Nile flooding, so he had the excess water dammed for farmers' benefit. In return, the priesthood promised annual celebrations of the king’s birthday and coronation, with all Egyptian priests serving him alongside the gods. The decree instructed that a copy be placed in every temple, written in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic, and the Greek language used by the Ptolemaic government.
The Ptolemaic kings needed the support of the priesthood to stay in power, especially the High Priests of Memphis, who held great religious authority and influence across Egypt. Since the decree was issued in Memphis, the ancient capital rather than Alexandria, the center of Ptolemaic government, it shows the young king wanted their active backing. Even though Egypt had been Greek-speaking since Alexander’s conquests, this decree, like earlier ones, included Egyptian text to connect with the people through the literate Egyptian priesthood.
There isn't one single correct English translation of the decree because our understanding of these ancient languages is still growing, and the three original versions vary slightly. Older translations by E. A. Wallis Budge from 1904 and 1913, as well as Edwyn R. Bevan’s 1927 version, are easy to find but are now out of date. A more recent translation by R. S. Simpson, based on the demotic text and available online, shows how much has changed. Also, a full modern translation of all three texts, complete with an introduction and facsimile drawings, was published in 1989 by Quirke and Andrews.
The stele now known as the Rosetta Stone probably didn’t start out at Rashid, where it was found, but was instead originally located at a temple further inland, possibly in the royal town of Sais. That temple was eventually closed around AD 392 when Roman emperor Theodosius I issued an order to shut down all non-Christian places of worship. At some point, the original stele cracked, and the largest fragment became the stone we recognize today. Later, many Egyptian temples were dismantled for their stone, used as quarries for new construction.
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In 1798, Napoleon's French Army of the Orient entered Egypt, accompanied by a group of 151 experts called the Commission des Sciences et des Arts. In July 1799, while strengthening the fortifications of Fort Julien near Rosetta, French soldiers uncovered a stone slab with inscriptions. Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard noticed it and informed Colonel d'Hautpoul, who recognized its potential. They reported the find to General Jacques-François Menou, who was in Rosetta at the time. The discovery was soon communicated to the Institut d'Égypte in Cairo. Michel Ange Lancret, a member of the Commission, wrote that it contained three scripts — the first in hieroglyphs, the third in Greek — and suggested they were versions of the same text. The report was presented to the Institute on 19 July. Bouchard then transported the stone to Cairo for scholarly study.
In September, the discovery was announced in Courrier de l'Égypte, the official newspaper of the French authorities in Egypt. An anonymous writer said the stone might one day unlock the secrets of hieroglyphs. By 1800, three technical experts from the commission had found ways to copy the inscriptions. Jean-Joseph Marcel, a printer and linguist, was the first to recognize that the middle text used demotic script—rarely seen on stone and unfamiliar to scholars—rather than Syriac as earlier believed. Nicolas-Jacques Conté figured out how to use the stone itself as a printing block. Antoine Galland used a different method. General Charles Dugua carried the resulting prints to Paris, where European scholars could now study them closely.
Napoleon abandoned his Egyptian campaign in August 1799, returning to Europe. By March 1801, British troops had landed at Abu Qir Bay. At that point, Menou commanded the Army of the Orient and led his forces north toward the Mediterranean to face the invaders, taking the stone and other antiquities with him. After being defeated at the Battle of Alexandria, the remnants of his army fled to Alexandria, where they became surrounded and laid siege to. With the Rosetta Stone now trapped inside the city, Menou eventually surrendered to the British and Ottomans on 30 August.
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After the surrender, a conflict emerged over who controlled the French scientific and archaeological findings in Egypt. Menou refused to give up the artefacts, drawings, notes, and biological specimens collected by the commission, claiming they belonged to the institute. British General John Hely-Hutchinson would not lift the siege until Menou complied. Two scholars, Edward Daniel Clarke and William Richard Hamilton, who had just arrived from England, agreed to inspect the collections in Alexandria. Clarke later wrote in a letter home that "we found much more in their possession than was represented or imagined."
Hutchinson insisted that every item found belonged to the British Crown, but French scholar Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire warned Clarke and Hamilton that the French would rather destroy their discoveries than surrender them, citing the tragic burning of the Library of Alexandria as a precedent. The two men tried to convince Hutchinson by appealing to the French scholars’ position, and he eventually agreed that things like natural history specimens could be treated as private property. Still, Menou moved quickly to claim the stone itself for himself, asserting it as his own personal possession.
It’s unclear exactly how the stone ended up in British hands, since accounts from the time conflict. Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who was supposed to oversee its transport to England, later said he personally took it from Menou and carried it away on a gun-carriage. But Edward Daniel Clarke offered a more detailed version, claiming that a French officer and member of the Institute had secretly brought him, his student John Cripps, and Hamilton into the back streets behind Menou’s home. There, they found the stone hidden under protective carpets among Menou’s belongings. According to Clarke, their guide was afraid French soldiers might steal it if they saw it. Hutchinson was told right away, and the stone was removed—possibly by Turner and his gun-carriage.
Turner transported the stone to England on the French frigate HMS Égyptienne, reaching Portsmouth in February 1802. He had been instructed to deliver it to King George III along with other ancient artifacts. The monarch’s representative, War Secretary Lord Hobart, decided it should go to the British Museum. According to Turner’s account, he and Hobart discussed that the stone be shown first to members of the Society of Antiquaries of London before its final placement in the museum. That meeting took place on 11 March 1802.
In 1802, the Society made four plaster casts of the inscriptions and sent them to Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Trinity College Dublin. Prints were also distributed to scholars across Europe. By year’s end, the stone itself was moved to the British Museum, where it remains today. On the slab's left and right sides, new white-painted text declared it had been "Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801" and "Presented by King George III."
Since June 1802, the Rosetta Stone has been on display almost continuously at the British Museum. During the mid-1800s, it was assigned the inventory number "EA 24", with "EA" standing for "Egyptian Antiquities". It was part of a collection seized from the French expedition, which included items like a sarcophagus of Nectanebo II and a statue of a high priest of Amun. Because the objects were too heavy for the original building, they were moved to a new extension. The stone itself was relocated to the sculpture gallery in 1834 after Montagu House was demolished. According to museum records, it remains the most-visited single object in the museum’s collection.
The Rosetta Stone was first shown at a slight angle, held in a custom-fitted metal cradle that required tiny cuts to be made in its sides. It had no protective cover at first, but by 1847 it was placed in a frame, even though guards were already assigned to keep visitors from touching it. Since 2004, the stone has been displayed in a specially designed case in the center of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. A replica exists today in the King’s Library at the British Museum, where it's free to touch and appears as it would have to early 19th-century visitors.
The museum worried about bombing in London during the First World War, so in 1917 the Rosetta Stone was moved to safety along with other valuable portable objects. For two years it sat 15 meters underground at a Postal Tube Railway station in Mount Pleasant near Holborn. The stone left the British Museum only once outside of wartime: for a month in October 1972, when it traveled to the Louvre in Paris to be displayed alongside Champollion's Lettre, marking the 150th anniversary of that letter’s publication. Even during conservation work in 1999, the stone stayed on view in the gallery so visitors could still see it.
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Before the Rosetta Stone was found and finally cracked open, nobody in the centuries that followed had been able to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. By the time of the Roman Empire, the script had already become so specialized that only a few people could understand it. As Egypt converted to Christianity, use of hieroglyphs faded away completely. The last known inscription, dated August 24, 394, came from Philae and is called the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom. A demotic text from the same place, the last of its kind, was written in the year 452.
Hieroglyphs kept their picture-like look, and ancient writers often highlighted that difference from Greek and Roman letters. By the 5th century, a priest named Horapollo had written Hieroglyphica, explaining nearly two hundred signs, which people took as truth, even though it was often wrong. That work, along with others, blocked real understanding for centuries. Later, in medieval Egypt during the 9th and 10th centuries, Arab historians tried to figure out hieroglyphs by comparing them to Coptic, the language used by Coptic priests. European scholars also attempted to crack the code—Jean-François Champollion would eventually succeed— but it wasn’t until the Rosetta Stone was found in 1799 that real progress began. Finally, Champollion used clues from that stone to solve the mystery that Kircher had called “the riddle of the Sphinx.”
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The Greek text on the Rosetta Stone became the key to unlocking the mystery of hieroglyphs, since scholars already understood Ancient Greek well enough to begin working with it. But in 1802, when Stephen Weston gave an English translation of the Greek at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, the translators were still figuring out how Greek was used in Ptolemaic Egypt. They didn’t yet know much about its role as a government language during that time, and large collections of Greek papyri hadn't been discovered yet. So even though they had the text, understanding it fully required more than just knowledge of the language — it needed context, too.
While two lithographic copies of the Rosetta Stone reached the Institut de France in Paris in 1801, librarian Gabriel de La Porte du Theil began translating the Greek text before being sent elsewhere by Napoleon. He left his work to colleague Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon, who published the first translations in 1803 in both Latin and French. Meanwhile, at Cambridge, Richard Porson reconstructed the missing lower right corner of the Greek text, sharing his version through the Society of Antiquaries. In Göttingen, Christian Gottlob Heyne produced a more reliable Latin translation, first published in 1803 and later reprinted by the Society of Antiquaries in 1811, alongside Weston’s English version and Colonel Turner’s account.
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When Jean-Antoine Chaptal sent a lithographic print of the Rosetta Stone to Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy in 1801, he had no idea it would lead to breakthroughs in understanding ancient Egyptian writing. Swedish scholar Johan David Åkerblad was already examining Demotic script found in Egypt but poorly understood, thinking it might be related to Coptic though looking quite different from later Coptic texts. Silvestre de Sacy recognized that the middle text on the stone matched this same script. Both assumed it was alphabetical and tried to find Greek names within the Demotic text to help decode it. By 1802, Silvestre de Sacy reported he had identified five names—Alexandros, Alexandreia, Ptolemaios, Arsinoe, and Epiphanes—and Åkerblad published an alphabet of 29 letters, more than half correct, based on those names. Still, they couldn't decipher the rest of the characters, which included both phonetic and ideographic symbols.
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Silvestre de Sacy eventually stopped working on the Rosetta Stone, but he made one more important contribution. In 1811, after talking with a Chinese student about Chinese script, he revisited an idea first suggested by Georg Zoëga in 1797: that foreign names in Egyptian hieroglyphs might be written phonetically. He also remembered Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s earlier thought from 1761 that the characters inside cartouches were proper names. When Thomas Young, who was foreign secretary of the Royal Society of London, wrote to him in 1814 about the stone, de Sacy replied by suggesting that Young look for cartouches containing Greek names and try to spot phonetic elements within them.
Young's work on the Rosetta Stone yielded two crucial findings that moved scholars closer to understanding ancient Egyptian writing. He identified the phonetic characters p t o l m e s — now written as p t w l m y s — which represented the Greek name Ptolemaios, and observed that these same signs looked remarkably like their equivalents in the demotic script. Noting the strong resemblance, he counted numerous parallels between the hieroglyphic and demotic versions on the stone, challenging the idea that they were entirely unrelated systems. This led him to correctly determine that the demotic script was not purely phonetic but also contained ideographic elements derived from hieroglyphs. These insights were included in the article "Egypt" he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1819, though he was unable to advance further after that.
In 1814, Thomas Young began exchanging letters about the Rosetta Stone with Jean-François Champollion, a scholar from Grenoble who had written extensively on ancient Egypt. By 1822, Champollion had seen copies of inscriptions from the Philae obelisk, where William John Bankes had noted the names Ptolemaios and Kleopatra in both Greek and hieroglyphic scripts. Using this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters for k l e o p a t r a — now transliterated as q l i҆ w p 3 d r 3.t. He quickly built an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphs, finishing his work by September 14 and publicly announcing it on the 27th to the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. That same day, he wrote Lettre à M. Dacier to Bon-Joseph Dacier, detailing his breakthrough. In the postscript, Champollion noted that similar phonetic elements appeared in both Greek and Egyptian names — a theory confirmed in 1823 when he identified pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose in cartouches at Abu Simbel, copied by Bankes and sent by Jean-Nicolas Huyot. From then on, the story of the Rosetta Stone and hieroglyphic decipherment branched out, as Champollion used many other texts to build a grammar and dictionary for Ancient Egyptian, published posthumously in 1832.
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After Champollion died in 1832, his draft analysis of how the three texts differed remained lost, and Antoine-Jean Letronne’s work on translating the Greek text stalled. It wasn’t until François Salvolini’s papers were discovered after his death in 1838 that the missing analysis resurfaced—though the find also exposed that Salvolini had plagiarized his own earlier work on the stone. Letronne then finished his commentary and French translation in 1841. In the early 1850s, German Egyptologists Heinrich Brugsch and Max Uhlemann created new Latin translations using the demotic and hieroglyphic versions. The first English version came out in 1858, produced by three members of the Philomathean Society at the University of Pennsylvania.
Whether one of the three texts was the standard version, from which the other two were originally translated, remains controversial. Letronne attempted to show in 1841 that the Greek version, the product of the Egyptian government under the Macedonian Ptolemies, was the original. Among recent authors, John Ray has stated that "the hieroglyphs were the most important of the scripts on the stone: they were there for the gods to read, and the more learned of their priesthood". Philippe Derchain and Heinz Josef Thissen have argued that all three versions were composed simultaneously, while Stephen Quirke sees in the decree "an intricate coalescence of three vital textual traditions". The fact that the three versions cannot be matched word for word helps to explain why decipherment has been more difficult than expected, especially for scholars who were expecting an exact bilingual key to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
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Even before the Salvolini affair, rivalries over credit and originality marked the race to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. Thomas Young’s contributions were acknowledged in Champollion’s 1822 Lettre à M. Dacier, but early British critics, like James Browne writing anonymously for the Edinburgh Review in 1823, accused Champollion of plagiarism, praising Young's work while calling the French scholar "unscrupulous." These criticisms were later translated into French by Julius Klaproth and published in 1827. Young himself reasserted his role in 1823. Their rivalry didn’t end with their deaths—Young in 1829, Champollion in 1832. Centuries later, in 1904, E. A. Wallis Budge emphasized Young’s efforts over Champollion’s. In the 1970s, visitors from different countries complained about the size of portraits of each man displayed side by side—only to discover they were exactly the same.
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In July 2003, a call went out from Zahi Hawass, who was then serving as Secretary-General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, asking that the Rosetta Stone be returned to Egypt. Through both Egyptian and international media, he referred to the stele as the "icon of our Egyptian identity." Two years later, in Paris, he renewed his request, naming the stone alongside other significant pieces of Egypt’s cultural heritage. These included the bust of Nefertiti held in Berlin; a statue of the Great Pyramid's architect Hemiunu in Hildesheim, Germany; the Dendera Temple Zodiac now in the Louvre; and the bust of Ankhhaf at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Hawass brought up the issue once more in August 2022.
In 2005, the British Museum gave Egypt a full-sized fibreglass replica of the stele, color-matched to the original. It was first shown in the renovated Rashid National Museum, an Ottoman house in the town of Rashid, which is near where the stone was discovered. In November 2005, Hawass said the British Museum could keep the Rosetta Stone for three months while reiterating that the ultimate goal was for it to return permanently. Then, in December 2009, he proposed that if the British Museum lent the stone to Egypt for three months for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza in 2013, he would drop his demand for the stone’s permanent return.
As John Ray has observed: "The day may come when the stone has spent longer in the British Museum than it ever did in Rosetta."
In 2002, over thirty of the world's most prominent museums, such as the British Museum and the Louvre, responded to repeated Greek requests for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon and similar demands from other countries by issuing a joint statement. These institutions typically oppose the repatriation of significant cultural artifacts like the Rosetta Stone, citing their role in global education and access. The response reflected a unified stance among major cultural repositories regarding the ownership and display of internationally important objects.
When museums hold objects from the past, we must remember that the people who collected them lived in a different time, with different values. The decisions made long ago shouldn’t define how we see these items today. Museums have always been more than just storage places for one country’s citizens — they belong to everyone. They serve all the people of the world, not just those living in the nation where the museum stands.
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Various ancient documents that helped scholars unlock long-dead languages have been called “Rosetta stones,” even when they weren’t the original stone from Egypt. For instance, the bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins of the Greco-Bactrian king Agathocles were described as “little Rosetta stones” because they helped Christian Lassen begin to decipher the Brahmi script, opening up ancient Indian writing. Another example is the Behistun Inscription in Iran, which connects translations of three Middle-Eastern languages—Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian—and has also been compared to the Rosetta Stone. There’s also the Sardis bilingual, sometimes called the Rosetta stone for the Lydian language.
The phrase “Rosetta stone” is sometimes used today to describe that first critical clue in breaking open a difficult code, especially when a small but meaningful piece unlocks the meaning of something much bigger. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first figurative use back to 1902, in an entry about glucose in the Encyclopædia Britannica. A later example appears in H. G. Wells’s 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, where a character finds a shorthand manuscript that becomes the key to interpreting other fragments written in longhand and typewriter.
Since then, the term has found its way into many fields beyond archaeology. In 1979, Nobel laureate Theodor W. Hänsch called the hydrogen atom's spectral pattern "the Rosetta Stone of modern physics," noting that once its lines were decoded, much else became clearer. The flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been referred to as "the Rosetta Stone of flowering time." Scientists have also described the technique of Doppler echocardiography as a Rosetta Stone for clinicians trying to understand how the heart fills during diastolic dysfunction. In immunology, fully understanding the key set of genes related to the human leucocyte antigen has been called "the Rosetta Stone of immunology." A gamma-ray burst associated with a supernova was labeled a Rosetta Stone for uncovering the origin of such bursts. The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft was sent to study comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, aiming to deepen our grasp of the Solar System's beginnings.
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