Today Marks 201st Anniversary of Deciphering of Rosetta Stone

Today, July 19, marks the 201st anniversary of the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone was discovered on this day in Egypt's Rashid City in 1799 by a French military officer. However, the stone was subsequently taken by British forces and shipped to England. It was then given to the British Museum where it remains.

The ancient Egyptian stone bears inscriptions in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Egyptian demotic. When French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphic text in 1822, the language and culture of ancient Egypt were suddenly open to researchers as never before.

The stone also brings language specialists and native speakers together to develop a meaningful survey and near-permanent archive of 1,500 languages, in physical and digital form, with the intent of it remaining useful from AD 2000 to 12,000.

Champollion noted that similar phonetic characters seemed to occur in both Greek and Egyptian names, a hypothesis confirmed in 1823 when he identified the names of pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose written in cartouches at Abu Simbel.

These far older hieroglyphic inscriptions had been copied by Bankes and sent to Champollion by Jean-Nicolas Huyot. From this point, the stories of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs diverge, as Champollion drew on many other texts to develop an Ancient Egyptian grammar and a hieroglyphic dictionary which were published after his death in 1832.

In November 2005, Hawass suggested a three-month loan of the Rosetta Stone, while reiterating the eventual goal of a permanent return.

According to UK historian David Abulafia, the Rosetta Stone is considered the most-visited object in the British Museum in London and one of the most important and impressive objects in the museum.