![]() The original was installed at the British Museum at the bequest of King George III in 1802. The stone was therefore shipped to the Society of Antiquaries in London where copies were made and disseminated to cities and universities across the world. As Bouchard perceived, assuming the inscriptions all said the same thing, knowledge of Greek could be used to decode the other two texts, which had until now eluded total decipherment. One was written in classical Greek another in Egyptian hieroglyphs and the third in what was assumed to be Syriac, but later identified as Demotic (a later Egyptian script used for day-to-day correspondence). ![]() Strikingly, the heavy slab featured three inscriptions, each of which was very different to look at. The mysterious ancient culture that resonates now To his credit, Bouchard realised at once that it was something important, and had it cleaned before taking it to the respected Institut d'Égypte in Cairo for closer examination. One of Napoleon's lieutenants, a military engineer named Pierre-François-Xavier Bouchard, was directing the demolition and reconstruction of the city's fort in July 1799 when the black object was spotted beneath the debris. The chance discovery of the monument in the Nile Delta at Rosetta, modern Rashid, some 23 years earlier had roused the interest of scholars globally. In his intense excitement, the 31-year-old Frenchman gathered up his notes, hurried to find his brother, and promptly fainted. Jean-François Champollion had been struggling over the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone for years when, one September afternoon in 1822, he believed he had finally cracked it.
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