The Rosetta Stone · Story Graph

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The Rosetta StoneHow a dull priestly decree, carved three times in 196 BC, became the key to a forgotten script, and why the argument over who owns it is still running.This interactive story graph needs JavaScript. The full content follows.

The Rosetta Stone: A broken slab of stone carrying one royal decree in three kinds of writing. It is the most famous object in the British Museum for one reason: it let people read ancient Egyptian again.

One decree, three scripts: The same message is written in hieroglyphs, in the everyday Demotic script and in Greek. Because scholars could read Greek, the Greek could be used to pry open the other two.

Broken and incomplete: The stone is only a broken part of a bigger slab, and the British Museum says its hieroglyphic text is only partially preserved. That is why decoders needed other inscriptions to find enough royal names.

Granodiorite or basalt?: Sources describe the stone's rock differently: the British Museum says grey and pink granodiorite, Britannica says black granite and captions it basalt, and Merriam-Webster says black basalt.

Ptolemy V, the boy king: A Macedonian rather than Egyptian king of Egypt, only a teenager when the decree was passed, whom the priests were asked to back as a divine ruler.

The decree of 27 March 196 BC: A council of priests at Memphis confirmed Ptolemy V's divine honours in return for his good deeds. It was a political bargain, and copies were meant for every sizeable temple.

The Great Rebellion: An Egyptian uprising against Ptolemaic rule that rumbled on for nearly twenty years. The decree is not just boilerplate: it recounts real events from the troubled reign, which is why the king needed the priests.

Other copies of the decree: The Rosetta Stone was never unique. Other stones carry the same decree or very similar ones, and some of them preserve the hieroglyphic text that is missing here.

The last hieroglyphs: Around the end of the 4th century the old temple scripts stopped being used, and with them the ability to read ancient Egyptian.

Coptic takes over: Egyptians began writing their own language with Greek letters plus a few Demotic signs. That script, Coptic, outlived hieroglyphs and later turned out to be a vital clue to what the old language sounded like.

Hieroglyphs as pure symbols: For centuries European scholars studied the signs as picture-ideas rather than as writing that stood for sounds. That assumption kept attempts at decipherment stuck.

Napoleon invades Egypt: The French expedition of 1798 came with soldiers and also with scholars and scientists, which is how a soldier's find became a scholarly object within days.

Found at Fort Saint-Julien: French soldiers working on a fort at Rashid (Rosetta) pulled the slab out of old masonry, and their officer saw at once that it mattered.

When was it found? Sources differ: Even the discovery is slightly fuzzy: the British Museum calls the account of 15 July 1799 the most generally accepted, Britannica says August 1799, and Egypt's antiquities ministry marks 19 July.

Copies fly around Europe: Before the stone left Egypt, French experts made prints from it, and later plaster casts and prints reached scholars across Europe. Decipherment began on paper copies, not at the stone.

The 1801 surrender: After the French lost to the British, the stone passed into British hands under a surrender agreement in 1801. Sources name the agreement differently and do not give one detailed account of the physical hand-over.

To London, 1802: A ship carried the stone to Portsmouth, and it was presented to the British Museum within months, along with other French-collected antiquities.

The Greek is read first: Scholars could already read Greek, so the bottom text gave the meaning of the decree almost at once. The first published translations of the Greek appeared in 1803.

Names found in the Demotic: Two European scholars compared the middle text with the Greek names and picked out proper names such as Ptolemy. It was real progress on the middle script, but the rest stayed unread.

Young reads "Ptolemy": The English physicist Thomas Young was one of the first to show that some hieroglyphs on the stone spelled sounds, namely the royal name Ptolemy, according to the British Museum. It was an early bridge from the picture signs to sound.

A second royal name: Cleopatra: The damaged stone only offered Ptolemy. An obelisk from Philae, moved to England, with a Greek-inscribed pedestal, supplied a second royal name, a queen's, which Champollion took to be Cleopatra, and with two names sharing letters the signs could be cross-checked.

Champollion's breakthrough: On 14 September 1822 Jean-François Champollion worked out that hieroglyphs record the sounds of the Egyptian language, not just ideas. According to the British Museum's account he burst out with a famous line before collapsing.

The Letter to M. Dacier: Champollion's printed letter explaining the phonetic hieroglyphic alphabet was read in public on 27 September 1822. The British Museum treats that reading as the moment of decipherment.

Sounds, names and Coptic: Champollion's second step was to show that the sound-signs spelled Egyptian names too, not just foreign ones. Armed with Coptic, he could start reading real inscriptions.

Young or Champollion?: Who deserves the credit has been argued since the 1820s. Britannica says the decipherment was largely the work of both men; the British Museum gives Champollion the decisive step.

On show since 1802: The stone has been on public view almost continuously since 1802. Even a wartime evacuation could not keep it away for long.

The 1999 cleaning: When the stone became the centrepiece of the museum's Cracking Codes exhibition in 1999, conservators cleaned off layers left by two centuries of copying and handling, including carnauba wax and printer's ink.

Calls to send it home: In November 2022 The National reported that Zahi Hawass, a former Egyptian antiquities minister, said 100,000 people had backed his petition and that he wanted a million signatures before sending it to the British Museum. ABC reported a second petition, by Monica Hanna, that calls the stone a "spoil of war".

The museum's reply: The British Museum rejects the idea that Egypt had no say in 1801, citing an Egyptian representative and an Ottoman admiral in the treaty, and says it has received no formal request from Egypt's government.

"A Rosetta Stone" for anything: The name has become a metaphor for anything that provides the key to understanding a hard code or puzzle.