Rosetta Stone found | July 19, 1799 | HISTORY (2024)

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Who discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799? ›

An irregularly shaped stone of black granite 3 feet 9 inches (114 cm) long and 2 feet 4.5 inches (72 cm) wide, and broken in antiquity, it was found near the town of Rosetta (Rashīd), about 35 miles (56 km) northeast of Alexandria. It was discovered by a Frenchman named Bouchard or Boussard in August 1799.

The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided critical missing information, gradually revealed by a succession of scholars, that eventually allowed Jean-François Champollion to solve the puzzle that Kircher had called the riddle of the Sphinx.

The Rosetta Stone is a large block of black granite, over 2,000 years old, that was rediscovered in Egypt in 1799. It was a remarkable find as it contains inscriptions that enabled scholars to learn how to read hieroglyphs that were previously indecipherable.

By accident, a stone that exhibited three different scripts—hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek—was discovered by members of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1799 near Rashīd (French: Rosette; English: Rosetta) on the Mediterranean coast.

Two-hundred years ago, French scholar and polymath Jean-François Champollion announced he had deciphered the Rosetta Stone.

By analyzing the Rosetta Stone and other texts, the young French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832) made a significant advance in understanding ancient Egyptian writing when he pieced together hieroglyphs used to write the names of non-Egyptian rulers.

The stone was officially turned over to the British in the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801, then accessioned into the British Museum in 1802. There, under registration number BM EA 24, it has remained on almost continuous display.

The sections of the stone that are missing include the top right and left corners and the bottom right corner. From comparisons of earlier decrees, it can be estimated that an additional 14 or 15 lines are missing from the hieroglyphics section at the top.

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the British Museum.

It helped people get a better understanding of the Ancient Egyptian writing system called hieroglyphics. Its discovery led to the translation of Ancient Egyptian writing. The stone is named after the city where it was found, Rosetta (also called Rashid).

What if we never found the Rosetta Stone? ›

Without the Rosetta stone, we would know nothing of the ancient Egyptians, and the details of their three thousand years of history would remain a mystery.

Missing from this list, however, is Sobekneferu, ancient Egypt's first female ruler. Why was the reign of this powerful woman all but forgotten? Piecing together the lost history of the first female pharaoh, Andrew Collins presents the first comprehensive biography of Sobekneferu.

When it was discovered, nobody knew how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Because the inscriptions say the same thing in three different scripts, and scholars could still read Ancient Greek, the Rosetta Stone became a valuable key to deciphering the hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyphic writing died out in Egypt in the fourth century C.E.. Over time the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs was lost, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 and its subsequent decipherment. The Stone is a tablet of black rock called granodiorite.

The missing fragments of the Rosetta stone have never been found. The piece we have had been used as construction material by the Ottomans after the original temple was destroyed and was rediscovered in 1799 by the French.

On Napoleon's defeat, the stone became the property of the British under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria (Opens in new window) (1801) along with other antiquities that the French had found. The stone was shipped to England and arrived in Portsmouth in February 1802.

The inscriptions on the dark grey granite slab became the seminal breakthrough in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics after it was taken from Egypt by forces of the British empire in 1801.

The British seized many of the discoveries that the French had made, including one of the most important, the Rosetta Stone.

One measure of the difficulty of deciphering the hieroglyphic system is that it took twenty-three years after the Rosetta Stone's discovery to crack it. The main reason is that scholars had long assumed that hieroglyphs were only ideograms, signs expressing ideas.