Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is a large fragment of a stele – an upright stone slab carrying an official text – made of dark grey granodiorite. It is about 1.1 metres high and weighs roughly 760 kilograms. Its front is polished and covered with three blocks of writing, one above the other.

All three blocks record the same decree, issued in 196 BC by Egyptian priests in honour of King Ptolemy V. The top block is written in hieroglyphs, the middle in Demotic, a cursive script used for everyday Egyptian, and the bottom in ancient Greek. The versions are not word-for-word identical, but they say essentially the same thing.

In itself the decree is a fairly routine piece of royal and religious politics; much of its wording follows models composed about a century earlier. What made the stone famous is its timing. When it was found in 1799, nobody alive could read hieroglyphs or Demotic, but many scholars could read Greek. The stone offered a readable Greek version alongside two then-undeciphered scripts recording Egyptian.

The stone has been in the British Museum in London since 1802 and is often said to be the museum’s most visited single object. Its name has also become an everyday expression: a “Rosetta Stone” is any key that unlocks a difficult problem.

The first thing to notice is that the stone is broken. It was once the lower part of a taller stele, which probably had a rounded top decorated with a scene of the king and the gods. The hieroglyphic section at the top suffered most: only the last 14 lines survive, and all are broken on the right. The Demotic section in the middle is the best preserved, with 32 lines. The Greek section at the bottom has 54 lines, the lower ones cut off by a diagonal break.

Look closely at the three scripts. Hieroglyphs are small pictures – birds, snakes, hands, reed leaves – arranged in rows. Some are surrounded by an oval ring called a cartouche, which marks the name of a king. Demotic looks like fast, joined-up handwriting and is hard for a beginner to connect with the pictures above. Greek is written in capital letters that anyone who knows the Greek alphabet can recognise.

The colour of the stone has changed over time. For many years after it came to London, its letters were filled with white chalk to make them easier to read and the surface was coated with wax, which made it look black; it was often wrongly called basalt. Cleaning in 1999 removed these later layers, revealing the original dark grey stone with a pink vein across the top left corner.

On the sides you can still see painted English words added in London: “Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801” on one edge and “Presented by King George III” on the other. These words are part of the object’s modern history.

The text is a decree of a synod – a large meeting – of Egyptian priests assembled at Memphis, the ancient capital where kings were crowned. It is dated to the ninth year of Ptolemy V, corresponding to 27 March 196 BC, and is linked with the celebration of his kingship. Sources describe the timing differently: the British Museum calls the date the first anniversary of his coronation, while other Egyptologists place the young king’s Egyptian-style coronation at Memphis on the previous day. The Greek and Egyptian versions also give different dates for his accession day, so the precise chronology needs caution.

The priests list the good deeds of the king. He gave silver and grain to the temples, remitted taxes and debts owed to the crown, released prisoners and supported the temples and the sacred animal cults. The decree also praises him, in traditional terms as a new Horus, for besieging the rebel-held Delta town of Lycopolis: when the Nile rose high in his eighth year, he had the outlets of the channels dammed and guarded so that the siege could continue, and the town was taken.

In return the priests increased the honours already paid to the king. A statue of him was to stand in every temple and be served by the priests three times a day; his birthday (the 30th) and the day of his accession (the 17th) were to be celebrated every month; and a five-day festival in his honour was to be held every year from the first day of the month Thoth.

The last lines order that the decree be inscribed on a stela of hard stone “in sacred and native and Greek characters” – that is, in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek – and set up in the temples of the first, second and third rank beside the statue of the king. That order is the reason the Rosetta Stone has three scripts – and why other copies of the same decree have since been found.

After Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC, one of his generals, Ptolemy, founded a dynasty that ruled Egypt for almost 300 years from the new Greek city of Alexandria. The government worked in Greek, while most of the population spoke Egyptian and worshipped the traditional gods in temples run by powerful priesthoods.

Ptolemy V Epiphanes came to the throne in 204 BC at the age of about five, after his parents died in suspicious circumstances. Court factions fought over the regency; one hated regent was killed by a mob in Alexandria. Abroad, the Seleucid king Antiochus III and Philip V of Macedon seized Ptolemaic territories, and in the Fifth Syrian War Egypt lost its lands in the Levant and Asia Minor.

Inside Egypt, a great revolt had broken out in the south around Thebes under two Egyptian rulers, Horwennefer and Ankhwennefer, who claimed to be pharaohs. It lasted from about 206–204 BC (sources differ) until 186 BC and cut much of Upper Egypt off from Ptolemaic control. In the Delta, rebels held the town of Lycopolis, which the decree says the king took by storm. In a separate clause, the decree says that those who had led rebellions in his father’s time were punished at Memphis when the king came there for the ceremonies of his assumption of the crown.

In this situation the support of the Egyptian priesthood was vital. It is significant that the decree was issued at Memphis, the old religious capital, rather than Alexandria, and that Ptolemy was crowned there in traditional Egyptian style. The decree is part of a bargain: the crown granted privileges and gifts to the temples, and the priests used their authority to present the young Greek-speaking king as a legitimate pharaoh.

Although there are three scripts, there are only two languages. Hieroglyphs and Demotic are both ways of writing Egyptian; Greek is a different language. Hieroglyphs were by then used mainly for sacred and monumental texts, and the hieroglyphic version is written in a deliberately old-fashioned form of the language, sometimes called “neo-Middle Egyptian,” imitating the classical Egyptian of more than a thousand years before. Demotic reflected the Egyptian actually spoken in Ptolemaic times.

Egyptian writing was not an alphabet. All three Egyptian scripts – hieroglyphic, the cursive hieratic, and Demotic – mixed phonetic signs, which stand for one, two or three consonants, with ideographic signs, including logograms for whole words and determinatives, silent signs that show what kind of word is meant. This mixture was the main reason decipherment was so hard.

Such priestly decrees, often called the Ptolemaic sacerdotal decrees, were a feature of the period. Earlier examples include the decrees of Alexandria (243 BC), Canopus (238 BC) and Raphia (217 BC). The 196 BC Memphis decree itself is also known from stelae found at Elephantine and Tell el-Yahudiya, and passages of it are paralleled on a later stela from Nobaireh. According to the British Museum, 29 stones carrying decrees of this kind have been found since 1799, 22 of them still in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone was the first to be discovered in modern times, not the only one.

Which version came first is still debated. In 1841 Antoine-Jean Letronne argued that the Greek text, produced by the government, was the original. Other scholars have argued that all three were composed together, or have stressed the special importance of the hieroglyphic text, meant “for the gods to read.” Because the three versions do not match word for word, early decipherers who expected an exact translation found the task harder than they had hoped.

The stone was almost certainly not made for Rosetta. It probably stood in a temple further inland, possibly at the royal city of Sais in the western Delta. As Christianity spread, the traditional cults and the use of Egyptian scripts declined at different rates in different places. Philae preserves the latest known dated hieroglyphic inscription, from AD 394, and dated Demotic inscriptions from AD 452. These attest late use of the scripts, but they do not establish exactly when knowledge of them disappeared, or when the Rosetta Stone itself was removed from its temple.

Old temples were often used as quarries. At some point the stele broke, and its largest piece was eventually built into the walls of a fortress near Rashid (Rosetta) that guarded a branch of the Nile. The fort is usually attributed to the Mamluk sultan Qaitbay in the late 15th century, but when the stone was built into it is not known.

In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt with an army accompanied by more than 150 scholars, engineers and artists. In July 1799 – traditionally on 15 July – soldiers digging the foundations of an addition to the fort, which the French called Fort Julien, uncovered the slab built into an old wall. The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, recognised that it might be important. A report to the new Institut d’Égypte in Cairo correctly suggested that the three texts were versions of one decree.

French scholars quickly made copies. The printer and linguist Jean-Joseph Marcel identified the middle script as Demotic, and the artist-inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté used the stone itself as a printing block to make ink impressions. These prints reached Paris and allowed scholars in Europe to begin work before the stone itself left Egypt.

British and Ottoman forces defeated the French in 1801. Under the Capitulation of Alexandria, negotiated by French, British and Ottoman commanders while Egypt was under Ottoman rule, the French had to hand over antiquities collected by the expedition. General Menou tried to claim the stone as his private property, and accounts of exactly how it passed into British hands differ. The British officer Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner later said he seized it himself and carried it off on a gun-carriage.

The stone reached Portsmouth in February 1802. After being shown at the Society of Antiquaries of London, which made plaster casts for the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin and circulated prints, it was presented to the British Museum by King George III in July 1802. It is now catalogued as EA 24.

The stone has been on display almost continuously since 1802. In 1917, near the end of the First World War, it was moved for safety to a station of the Post Office railway 50 feet below Holborn, where it spent two years. It has left the museum only once in peacetime: in October 1972 it was shown for a month at the Louvre in Paris beside Champollion’s famous letter, for its 150th anniversary. Today it stands in the Egyptian sculpture gallery (Room 4), and a touchable replica stands in the Enlightenment gallery (Room 1).

The stone’s journey mirrors wider history: an ancient Egyptian monument, reused at some unknown date as building material in a fort near Rashid, was found during one European power’s invasion and taken by another as a spoil of war after the French defeat in 1801. The painted words on its sides – “Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801” – openly record that origin.

Before 1799, hieroglyphs had been misunderstood for centuries. The Hieroglyphica, attributed to the Egyptian author Horapollo (5th century AD) and surviving in Greek, explained them largely as symbolic pictures with hidden meanings, and this idea misled later readers. Medieval Arabic-language scholars also investigated ancient Egyptian writing; a work attributed to Ibn Wahshiyya attempts to interpret hieroglyphs, but its accuracy and significance are disputed. In the 17th century the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher argued correctly that Coptic descended from ancient Egyptian, even though his translations of hieroglyphs were fanciful.

Work began with the Greek, which was translated in 1802–1803. In 1802 Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad used the Greek names to find their equivalents in the Demotic text, which was the best-preserved Egyptian version. De Sacy identified several names, including Ptolemy and Alexander, and Åkerblad drew up a Demotic alphabet of 29 signs, about half of them correct, and read a few other words. But they assumed Demotic was purely alphabetic, and could go no further.

The British polymath Thomas Young, famous also for his work on light, made the next steps from 1814. Following a hint that names in cartouches were written phonetically, he identified the signs spelling Ptolemy in the hieroglyphic text. He also noticed many resemblances between hieroglyphic and Demotic signs and concluded, correctly, that Demotic mixed phonetic and non-phonetic signs derived from hieroglyphs. He proposed meanings for a number of hieroglyphic words, many of them correct, and published his results in an encyclopedia article in 1819.

Jean-François Champollion, born in Figeac and educated partly in Grenoble, who knew Coptic well, made the decisive breakthrough. Using the Ptolemy cartouche from Rosetta and a Cleopatra cartouche from an obelisk from Philae, he built up a list of phonetic signs. Accounts of his breakthrough connect it with his reading of the names of the native pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose in copies of temple inscriptions, which showed that phonetic signs were used long before Greek rule, though the exact sequence of his discoveries is uncertain. On 27 September 1822 he presented his results to the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris (published as the Lettre à M. Dacier). His Précis of 1824 explained that hieroglyphic writing was “figurative, symbolic and phonetic” all at once.

By 1824 the short hieroglyphic text on the stone had given all it could; Champollion moved on to hundreds of other inscriptions and papyri. He died in 1832, leaving an incomplete grammar and dictionary. Later scholars corrected his system: Karl Richard Lepsius explained signs that stand for two or three consonants in 1837, Heinrich Brugsch advanced Demotic studies, and Emmanuel de Rougé published the first translations of Egyptian literature in the 1850s.

An important independent check came in 1866, when Karl Richard Lepsius and his travelling companions found at Tanis a well-preserved copy of the Canopus Decree, another priestly decree written, like the Rosetta Stone, in two languages and three scripts. Comparing its Egyptian and Greek versions gave an independent check on a decipherment that scholars were already using to translate Egyptian texts, and confirmed that the method was sound. Together with that work, it opened up more than three thousand years of history, religion and literature.

The decipherment of Egyptian, together with the decipherment of cuneiform in the same century, transformed the study of the earliest human history. Texts such as the Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead and Egyptian stories and letters could now be read in their own words rather than through Greek and Roman reports.

The phrase “Rosetta Stone” became a metaphor for any crucial key. Other multilingual inscriptions, such as the Behistun Inscription in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, which was crucial for cuneiform, have been called “Rosetta Stones.” Scientists have used the phrase for the hydrogen spectrum in physics, a plant used in genetics, and much else, and the European Space Agency named its comet probe Rosetta.

Who deserves credit for the decipherment has been argued since the 1820s. Champollion’s Lettre acknowledged Young’s work on Demotic but did not mention Young’s analysis of the Ptolemy cartouche or his identification of the feminine name ending. Young, believing these had made Champollion’s progress possible, wrote privately that if Champollion had borrowed an English key, “the lock was so dreadfully rusty” that no ordinary arm could have turned it. British reviewers in the 1820s accused Champollion of plagiarism; E. A. Wallis Budge in 1904 again stressed Young’s role.

Modern historians of the decipherment generally see the achievement as cumulative but give Champollion the decisive role. Young did not establish the general phonetic principles of hieroglyphic writing, but his work went beyond names, especially in Demotic and in proposing the meanings of many hieroglyphic words. Champollion’s knowledge of Coptic allowed him to move from reading names to reading the language. Recent accounts note that the Lettre itself was only a modest advance over Young; the real leap came in 1823–24, when Champollion showed that phonetic signs were used throughout the script, not only in royal names.

The story also illustrates the limits of a single “key.” The hieroglyphic part of the stone is badly damaged and contains relatively few signs, and the three versions are not exact translations. Much of the decisive evidence came from elsewhere: the Philae obelisk, copies of inscriptions from Abu Simbel and other temples, the Abydos king list and Coptic vocabulary. How exactly Champollion reached some of his conclusions cannot be fully reconstructed, because contemporary accounts conflict and his famous exclamation “I’ve got it!” comes from a biography written in 1906.

Champollion’s own system had serious errors. He overestimated the similarity between classical Egyptian and Coptic and believed each phonetic sign stood for a single sound. Lepsius, Edward Hincks, de Rougé and others corrected these points. Historians therefore now describe the decipherment as a process lasting from 1799 to the 1860s involving many scholars, including earlier Arab and European work on Coptic, rather than a single moment of genius.

Calls for the stone’s return have come mainly from Egyptian officials, scholars and campaigners rather than through a settled legal process. In 2003 Zahi Hawass, then head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, called for its return, and he later proposed a loan for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum; after leaving office he renewed the demand in 2022. A petition by the campaign Repatriate Rashid asks the Egyptian prime minister to submit an official request for the stone and other objects removed under the 1801 capitulation.

The British Museum gave Egypt a full-size replica in 2005, first displayed in the Rashid National Museum near the find spot, and has kept the original. Defenders of large encyclopaedic collections argue that objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of the values of that era and that “universal museums” serve people of every nation. That position was set out in the 2002 Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums, signed by the directors of 18 museums in Europe and North America; the British Museum was not among the signatories. Critics reply that the idea of the universal museum mainly benefits institutions in former imperial capitals.

The stone’s history raises specific questions. It was not excavated but removed from a military fort; it passed between two foreign armies at war on Egyptian soil; and the 1801 capitulation that transferred it was negotiated by French, British and Ottoman commanders while Egypt was under Ottoman rule, with no Egyptian party. Repatriate Rashid argues that the transfer was unlawful as well as colonial in character; these legal claims are the campaign’s arguments rather than settled conclusions. For many commentators the question is also about who controls the symbols of Egypt’s history.

The Egyptologist John Ray has observed that the day may come when the stone has spent longer in the British Museum than it ever did at Rosetta. As of October 2026 the original remains in the British Museum, where it is listed in the collection as EA 24; the debate continues as part of a wider international reassessment of collections formed during the colonial era.