Ancient Egypt · 196 BCE; deciphered 1822

What Is the Rosetta Stone and Why Is It Important?

By the Aurelius editorial team · 3 min read · Updated 15 October 2026

Last time: Ramses II carved his deeds on temple walls across Egypt, in hieroglyphs that would one day fall silent.

In September 1822 a young French scholar is said to have run down a Paris street to his brother's office, shouted “I've got it!”, and fainted. What he had got was a way into a script no one had been able to read for some 1,400 years.

A script that fell silent

Hieroglyphs were in use from about 3200 BCE. For daily business, scribes wrote quicker scripts: hieratic, and later Demotic. After Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, it was ruled by the Greek-speaking Ptolemies, and Greek became the language of government.

Hieroglyphs survived in temples, known to fewer and fewer priests. The last dated inscription was carved at Philae on 24 August 394 CE. Once the temples closed, nobody could read them. Later writers decided they were mystical symbols, not a way of writing sounds, and that error held scholars back for centuries.

One decree, three scripts

On 27 March 196 BCE, priests gathered at Memphis issued a decree honouring the thirteen-year-old king Ptolemy V: he had cut taxes, pardoned rebels and given gifts to the temples, so his statue would stand in every temple. Copies were to be set up across Egypt.

One copy, carved on a slab of granodiorite, gave the same text in hieroglyphs, for the gods; Demotic, the everyday script; and Greek, the language of the rulers. Centuries later it was reused as building material in a fort near the Delta town of Rashid, known to Europeans as Rosetta.

Found by soldiers, kept by rivals

In July 1799, during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, French soldiers rebuilding that fort found the stone. An officer, Pierre-François Bouchard, saw that it bore three scripts and that the Greek could be read. The stone is incomplete: most of the hieroglyphic text, at the top, has broken away. The scholars who had come with the army made copies.

When the French surrendered to the British in 1801, the treaty handed over the stone and other finds. It went to the British Museum in 1802 and has been there ever since, except for safekeeping in an underground railway tunnel during the First World War.

The race to read it

The Greek told scholars what the other texts said. The hard part was how. The English polymath Thomas Young made real progress after 1814: he showed that the ovals called cartouches held royal names, and worked out some sound values from “Ptolemy”.

Jean-François Champollion went further. He knew Coptic, the last form of the Egyptian language, written in Greek letters. Comparing the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra, then reading Ramses and Thutmose in copies of other inscriptions, he saw that hieroglyphs mixed sound signs with signs for whole words. On 27 September 1822 he presented his system to the Academy in Paris, in his “Letter to M. Dacier”.

The voices come back

Champollion's method opened up 3,000 years of Egyptian writing: temple walls, tomb texts, letters, accounts, love poems and tax receipts. Egyptology as a discipline began with it. He died in 1832, aged 41, before he could finish his grammar.

The stone itself is now the most visited object in the British Museum, and a disputed one. Egyptian archaeologists and campaigners have repeatedly called for it to be returned to Egypt.

In their own words

“This decree shall be set up on a stele of hard stone, in sacred and native and Greek letters, and set up in each of the first, second, and third (rank) temples at the image of the ever-living king.”

Egyptian priests assembled at Memphis, The Memphis Decree (Rosetta Stone), Greek text, last lines, 27 March 196 BCE

Translation by Edwyn Bevan, The House of Ptolemy (1927). “Sacred” letters are hieroglyphs and “native” letters Demotic: the clause that made the stone a key to the scripts.

Why it happened

• Greek rule made a bilingual decree necessary, so the same text was written in three scripts.
• Napoleon's 1798 expedition brought soldiers and scholars to the Delta.
• Champollion's knowledge of Coptic let him link signs to the sounds of the Egyptian language.

What happened next

• Egyptologists could read inscriptions like Ramses II's Kadesh texts and Hatshepsut's temple walls. Read the story →
• Cleopatra's name was one of the keys Champollion used, read from an obelisk at Philae. Read the story →
• The stone became a symbol of the debate over returning objects taken in colonial times.

Why it still matters

In 2022, the bicentenary of Champollion's breakthrough, Egyptian archaeologists led a petition signed by tens of thousands of people asking the British Museum to return the Rosetta Stone. The museum, whose trustees are barred by law from giving away objects in its collection, has kept it on display.

Connected stories

• Alexander the Great: From Macedon to India: Alexander's conquest put Greek-speaking kings on Egypt's throne, which is why the decree needed a Greek version.
• Ramses II: Kadesh, a Peace Treaty and a Giant Ego: Champollion read Ramses's name in a cartouche from Abu Simbel, one of his first proofs.
• Cleopatra: The Last Queen of Egypt: Ptolemy V was an ancestor of Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of the same dynasty.

Sources

• Carol Andrews, British Museum, The Rosetta Stone (1981)
• Jean-François Champollion, Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques (1822)
• Andrew Robinson, Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion (2012)
• Ilona Regulski (ed.), British Museum, Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt (2022)

Images are credited under each picture. Paintings and photographs come from public collections via Wikimedia Commons; scenes with no surviving image are marked as illustrations.