The Rosetta Stone and Napolean

The Rosetta Stone was found on July 19, 1799, by a French soldier named Pierre Bouchard. Napolean Bonaparte had just invaded Egypt and he brought along a group of scholars with orders to seize all important cultural artifacts. Pierre was aware of this and informed his superiors. 

The Rosetta stone is a black basalt slab roughly four feet long and two and a half feet wide. It is inscribed with 3 languages: Egyptian Demotic, Greek and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. It’s significance lies in the fact that the Greek text states that all three scripts have the same meaning. This allowed scholars to translate the Hieroglyphics text, as scholars already understood Greek, and meant that other messages written in Hieroglyphics could now be interpreted more easily. The ancient language of Hieroglyphics had been considered ‘dead’ for 2000 years.

When Napolean was defeated by the British, they took possession of the stone, and it found its way to the British Museum.

Later, scholars like Englishman Thomas Young and Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion managed to crack the code of Hieroglyphics using the stone’s inscriptions.