The Stone That Spoke

In the summer of 1799, French soldiers were rebuilding an old fort near the town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, in the delta of the River Nile. As they pulled apart a crumbling wall, one of them noticed a large slab of dark grey stone, with one corner broken away.

Its face was covered with writing. Not one kind of writing, but three.

The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, realised at once that it might be important. He was right. The broken slab would become one of the most famous objects in the world: the Rosetta Stone.

A forgotten language

For thousands of years, the people of ancient Egypt had written with hieroglyphs: beautiful little pictures of birds, eyes, reeds, snakes, hands and feet, carved on temple walls and painted inside tombs.

But Egypt changed. It was ruled by Greeks, then Romans, and new religions and languages spread. The last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved in the year 394 CE. After that, the knowledge slowly died. For more than fourteen hundred years, nobody could read a single word.

Scholars guessed. Many believed that every hieroglyph was a symbol carrying a deep, secret meaning, a picture of an idea rather than a sound. Their guesses were mostly wrong.

Three scripts, one message

The soldiers had found the stone during Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt. Napoleon had brought scholars with him as well as soldiers, and they quickly made copies of the inscriptions.

At the top of the stone were hieroglyphs. In the middle was a flowing script called Demotic, the everyday handwriting of later Egypt. And at the bottom was ancient Greek, which scholars could still read.

The Greek text explained what the stone was. It was a decree made by a council of Egyptian priests in 196 BCE, honouring the young king Ptolemy V. And it said that the decree should be written in sacred writing, in the native script and in Greek.

That meant the three texts said the same thing. If you could read one, you had a key to the others.

In 1801, after the French were defeated in Egypt, the stone was handed over to the British. Since 1802 it has been in the British Museum in London. But copies of its writing travelled all over Europe, and the race to read it began.

The boy from Figeac

Jean-François Champollion was born on 23 December 1790 in Figeac, a small town in the south of France. He was a remarkable child. Before he was twenty, he had studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Persian and other languages.

Above all, he learned Coptic, a language still used in the services of the Egyptian Christian church. Champollion believed, correctly, that Coptic was descended from the language of the ancient Egyptians. If he could find the sounds hidden in the hieroglyphs, Coptic might tell him what the words meant.

He was not alone in the race. In England, the brilliant scientist Thomas Young made real progress. He worked out that the oval rings called cartouches, which appear on the Rosetta Stone, held the name of a king, Ptolemy, and he correctly matched several signs to sounds.

But Young believed that sound signs were used only for foreign names, like the Greek name Ptolemy. Champollion would go much further.

The key turns

For years Champollion compared signs, counted them, and studied every copy of Egyptian writing he could find. He noticed that the hieroglyphic text on the stone had far more signs than the Greek text had words. So the signs could not each stand for a whole idea. Many of them must stand for sounds.

He compared the name Ptolemy with another royal name, Cleopatra, copied from an obelisk found on the island of Philae. The two names share the sounds P, O and L, and the same signs appeared just where those sounds should be. Slowly he built up an alphabet of sound signs.

Then, in September 1822, he looked at copies of carvings from ancient Egyptian temples, from long before the Greeks arrived. In one cartouche he saw a sun-like circle, which he knew from Coptic was pronounced Ra, followed by signs he could read as sounds. Together they made the name Ramesses, one of the greatest pharaohs. In another, he read the name Thutmose.

These were Egyptian kings, with Egyptian names. The writing really did combine pictures for ideas with signs for sounds, and it had done so all along.

The story goes that Champollion ran to his brother's office, cried out that he had done it, and then collapsed and lay unconscious for some days. Whatever the exact details, on 27 September 1822 he presented his discovery to scholars in Paris, in a famous letter to the secretary of the French Academy, Bon-Joseph Dacier.

Voices from the past

In 1828, Champollion finally travelled to Egypt. For more than a year he sailed up the Nile, reading inscriptions on temple walls that no one had understood for fourteen centuries.

He died in 1832, at only forty-one, worn out by work and illness. But his method lived on. Scholars who followed him learned to read Egyptian fluently, and today we can read the prayers, letters, stories, songs and jokes of people who lived more than four thousand years ago.

The Rosetta Stone still stands in the British Museum, among the most visited objects there. Its name has become a word for any key that unlocks a mystery.

Want to read more?

Andrew Robinson's Cracking the Egyptian Code is a lively biography of Champollion. Lesley and Roy Adkins's The Keys of Egypt tells the story of the race between Champollion and Young, and Richard Parkinson's Cracking Codes is the British Museum's own illustrated guide.