The Slab That Cracked Hieroglyphs Open

In July 1799, a soldier in Napoleon's army named Pierre-François Bouchard was rebuilding fortifications near the Egyptian town of Rashid — Rosetta to the French — when he noticed a slab of dark granodiorite built into a wall. It was about 112 cm tall, broken at the top and along one side, and covered with three different scripts. He had it pulled out and sent to the savants Napoleon had brought along.

The Egyptologist on the team realized within days what the stone was. The same text appeared three times: classical Greek at the bottom, demotic Egyptian (the everyday script of the late period) in the middle, and Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top. Greek was readable. Hieroglyphs had been mute for fourteen centuries — the last fluent reader had likely died in the 4th century AD. A bilingual decree was a key.

The text itself is dull. It records a council of priests at Memphis in 196 BC affirming the cult honors due to the thirteen-year-old pharaoh Ptolemy V. Bureaucracy. But the parallel allowed Thomas Young in England to identify the cartouche of Ptolemy in 1814, and Jean-François Champollion in Paris to demonstrate in 1822 that hieroglyphs were not pure pictograms. They were a hybrid — some signs stood for sounds, some for ideas, some for both. Champollion finally read the names of pharaohs whose tombs everyone had been staring at for centuries.

The stone itself ended up in British hands after Napoleon's army surrendered in 1801, under a treaty clause that explicitly demanded the antiquities. It has been on display at the British Museum since 1802. Egypt has been formally requesting it back since 2003.