The Rosetta Stone: How a Broken Slab Unlocked Hieroglyphs

For about 1,400 years, nobody could read Egyptian hieroglyphs. The script covered temples, tombs and obelisks, but its meaning had been lost. Then, in 1799, French soldiers in Egypt pulled a broken stone slab out of a fort's foundations. It carried the same decree in three scripts, one of which scholars could still read.

The Rosetta Stone did not decode anything by itself. It gave scholars a starting point, and the decipherment took more than two decades of rival work, mainly by Thomas Young in England and Jean-François Champollion in France.

This guide draws on the British Museum, which has held the stone since 1802, to explain what the stone is, what it says, how it was found, and how the code was cracked.

What the stone is

The British Museum's collection record describes the stone as part of a grey and pink granodiorite stela, an inscribed stone slab. It measures about 112 centimeters at its longest, 76 centimeters wide and 28 centimeters thick. The museum dates the inscription to 196 BC.

The text is a decree passed by a council of priests. It affirms the royal cult of the 13-year-old King Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. The museum's timeline gives the date it was issued as March 27, 196 BC. The Ptolemies were a Macedonian Greek dynasty, and the decree confirmed Ptolemy V's status as a divine ruler. In return, it lists the good deeds he had done for the temples. The museum notes that this was a change from earlier times, when decrees like this were usually issued by the king rather than by priests.

The same decree appears three times. The hieroglyphic version has 14 surviving lines, the Demotic version 32 and the Greek version 54. The museum explains the choice of scripts: hieroglyphs suited a priestly decree, Demotic was the everyday Egyptian script, and Greek was the language of the government.

Not one stone, but one of many

The decree itself said a copy should be set up in every sizable temple in Egypt. The museum says no one knows whether that happened, but other copies have turned up. It counts 29 decrees of this kind on stone found across Egypt, starting with the Rosetta Stone, and 22 of them remain in Egypt. Three are almost exact copies of the Ptolemy V decree. Because the Rosetta Stone is broken at the top, these other stones helped scholars restore the full hieroglyphic text.

The wording wasn't new, either. The museum says it was partly copied from a model written about a century earlier, with some passages changing only the names and dates. Still, the decree mentions real events, including a great rebellion against Ptolemaic rule that lasted from 204 to 186 BC.

How the ability to read hieroglyphs was lost

The British Museum's timeline traces the decline. In the centuries around the start of the common era, Egyptians developed Coptic, a way of writing their language with Greek letters plus a few extra signs. Greek and Coptic gradually replaced the older scripts. The last known hieroglyphic inscription, carved by a priest at Philae temple, dates to AD 394. After that, the ability to read the script disappeared.

People kept trying, according to the museum. Medieval Arab scholars studied hieroglyphs, and some consulted speakers of Coptic. Renaissance scholars in Rome studied obelisks. But Europeans generally believed hieroglyphs stood for ideas, as symbols, rather than recording a spoken language. That assumption held back progress for a long time.

Found in 1799, and how it reached London

The stone is named after Rashid, a port in the Nile Delta that the French called Rosetta. The museum's accounts are open about the uncertainty. Its main article says accounts of the find are "now rather vague." The most widely accepted version is that soldiers found it on July 15, 1799, while digging foundations for an addition to a fort near the town, where it had apparently been built into an old wall. The museum's timeline describes soldiers repairing a fort and pulling the stone from the rubble of its foundations. The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, recognized its importance.

When France was defeated in Egypt, the Treaty of Alexandria of 1801 transferred the stone and other antiquities to Britain. It reached Portsmouth in February 1802, and King George III presented it to the British Museum that July. It has been on display there ever since, with one break. In 1917, fearing bombing raids, the museum moved it to a station on the Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below Holborn, where it stayed for two years.

Young, Champollion and the breakthrough

Copies and casts of the inscription circulated across Europe. The museum credits Thomas Young (1773–1829), an English physicist, with showing that some of the hieroglyphs spelled out the sounds of a royal name, Ptolemy. A letter Young wrote in 1818 suggested meanings for groups of signs that were mostly correct, but he could not work out how the signs carried their meaning.

Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) took the next steps. He first worked out the signs used to write the names of foreign rulers. A famous story, retold in the museum's timeline, says that on September 14, 1822, he excitedly visited his brother, gasped "Je tiens l'affaire, vois!" (roughly, that he had cracked it) and promptly collapsed. Treat the exact wording with some caution: this is a story told about him, not something he wrote down, and published versions of his words differ slightly.

His notes became the basis of a letter, published in Paris that year as the Lettre à M. Dacier, which set out how hieroglyphs wrote the names of rulers. On September 27, 1822, he presented his findings to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris. Young was in the audience. The museum considers the public reading of that letter the moment of decipherment.

His second breakthrough was realizing that the same sound signs were used for Egyptian names as well, not just foreign ones. Combined with his knowledge of Coptic, which descends from ancient Egyptian, this let him start reading full inscriptions.

How much credit Young deserves is still a sensitive question, and even the British Museum's own wording varies. Its collection record says Young "was the first" to show that some hieroglyphs wrote sounds. Its main article says he was "one of the first." Either way, the museum describes the two men's work as overlapping in significant ways.

What decipherment opened up

Being able to read hieroglyphs changed Egyptian history. The museum says Champollion compared a papyrus king list in Turin with the Abydos King List, which helped reveal that Egyptian civilization was much older than classical Greece or Rome. His Egyptian Grammar was published in 1836, four years after his death. Later tools followed, including the first Arabic-hieroglyph dictionary, begun by Ahmed Kamal in the early 1900s, and Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar of 1927.

Key takeaways

• The Rosetta Stone is a broken granodiorite stela carrying a priestly decree for Ptolemy V from 196 BC, written in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek.
• It is one of at least 29 similar decrees on stone, and other copies helped restore its damaged hieroglyphic text.
• Accounts of its 1799 discovery vary in detail, and the British Museum says so openly.
• Young identified sound signs in royal names, and Champollion showed that hieroglyphs recorded the sounds of the Egyptian language. He announced his breakthrough in September 1822.
• Knowing Coptic, the late form of Egyptian, was essential to reading the script again.

Sources

• British Museum, Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone (published July 14, 2017; updated July 2, 2026)
• British Museum, Collection online: The Rosetta Stone, EA24
• British Museum, How Egyptian hieroglyphs were decoded: a timeline to decipherment
• British Museum, Explore the Rosetta Stone