How did the Rosetta Stone unlock an entire lost language?
One broken slab decoded 3,000 years of silence.
The answer
Discovered by Napoleon's soldiers in 1799 near Rosetta, Egypt, this granodiorite stele bears the same decree written in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. Because scholars could read Greek, they used it as a key to decode the hieroglyphics. Jean-François Champollion cracked the code in 1822, realizing hieroglyphs were a mix of phonetic and ideographic symbols, instantly reopening millennia of ancient Egyptian history to the modern world.
Source: British Museum
- Egypt
- linguistics
- archaeology
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