Rosetta_stone «iPhone»

In , during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, French soldiers were digging foundations to shore up the fort’s defenses. Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard spotted the dark granodiorite slab built into an old wall and immediately realized its potential importance. Because scholars already knew how to read Ancient Greek, they hoped this stone would finally provide the "key" to translating the mysterious hieroglyphs, which had been unreadable for nearly 1,400 years. The Great Decipherment Race

: A French scholar who made the ultimate breakthrough in 1822 . Using his knowledge of Coptic (a later form of the Egyptian language), he proved that hieroglyphs represented actual sounds and phonetic elements, not just symbolic pictures. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone rosetta_stone

: An English physicist who first identified that hieroglyphs in oval frames (cartouches) were phonetic spellings of royal names like "Ptolemy". In , during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, French soldiers

The story of the begins in 196 BC , when a council of Egyptian priests in Memphis issued a royal decree on behalf of the 13-year-old King Ptolemy V . To ensure everyone could read it, the decree was inscribed in three different scripts: Hieroglyphic (for the gods), Demotic (for the common people), and Ancient Greek (for the ruling class). Originally part of a larger stela placed in an Egyptian temple, the stone was later broken and eventually used as simple building material for Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) . The Accidental Rediscovery The Great Decipherment Race : A French scholar

After the French were defeated by the British in 1801, the stone was seized as a prize of war and transported to the in London, where it has remained since 1802. A high-stakes intellectual race began between two rivals: