How were hieroglyphs deciphered? The Rosetta Stone story

The Rosetta Stone is a photocopy. A 44-inch-tall stone photocopy of a government decree that wasn’t even original when it was carved. And it’s still the most famous rock in the world, because without it we’d have spent a lot longer locked out of everything the ancient Egyptians wrote. So how were hieroglyphs deciphered after fourteen centuries of silence? The answer involves Napoleon’s soldiers, an English physicist, a British duke who lent his gun carriage to haul an obelisk, a 31-year-old Frenchman who reportedly collapsed after shouting that he’d figured it out, and a literary society in Philadelphia that wanted in on the action.

A mass-produced decree from 196 BC

The British Museum, which has held the stone in London since 1802, doesn’t sugarcoat it: the Rosetta Stone is one of many stelae churned out to spread an agreement from a council of priests across Egypt. The text itself orders a copy set up in every major temple in the country.

The decree dates to 196 BC and marks the first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V, a 13-year-old king. The priests of Memphis confirm his status as a divine ruler even though he was Macedonian, not Egyptian. So far, pure ceremony.

Here’s the fun part. According to the museum, the text is partly a copy of a template written about a century earlier, and in some passages only the names and dates were changed. Find and replace, Ptolemaic edition. Three near-identical copies of this same Ptolemy V decree are known, and as of 2026 the museum counts 29 decrees of this kind carved in stone across Egypt, 22 of which are still there. Some of those sister stones have helped fill in the hieroglyphic section, which is broken and incomplete on the Rosetta Stone.

Paperwork or not, it has real history in it. Between the boilerplate, the decree mentions actual events from the reign, including the Great Rebellion, an Egyptian uprising that challenged Ptolemaic rule for nearly two decades, from 204 to 186 BC.

Three scripts, one message

What turns this photocopy into a treasure is that the decree is written out three times. At the top, in hieroglyphs, the sacred script fit for a priestly decree. In the middle, in Demotic, the cursive Egyptian handwriting used for everyday business; the name means “of the people.” At the bottom, in ancient Greek, the language of the Greek-Macedonian rulers who took over Egypt after Alexander the Great’s conquest.

The museum’s catalog entry counts the lines: 14 of hieroglyphs, 32 of Demotic and 54 of Greek. The slab measures 112.3 centimeters long, 75.7 wide and 28.4 thick, roughly 44 by 30 by 11 inches, and it’s gray and pink granodiorite. It’s only a chunk of a bigger stela that has lost its top.

Notice the detail: that’s two languages and three scripts. Hieroglyphs and Demotic write the same language, Egyptian, with two different systems. Greek is a different language entirely. And in 1799, Greek was perfectly readable. That was the whole trick. If all three versions say the same thing, the one you understand gives you clues about the ones you don’t.

Found by soldiers on a construction job

The stone is named after the place it turned up: Rashid, a port in the Nile Delta that the French called Rosetta. Napoleon campaigned in Egypt from 1798 to 1801, aiming to dominate the eastern Mediterranean and threaten Britain’s hold on India.

Accounts of the discovery are a bit hazy, the British Museum admits. The most widely accepted version says soldiers found it by accident on July 15, 1799, while digging foundations for an extension to a fort near Rashid. The stone had been built into a very old wall, recycled as building material. The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, realized it mattered.

The French didn’t keep it long. After Napoleon’s defeat in Egypt, the Treaty of Alexandria of 1801 made it British property, along with other antiquities. It reached Portsmouth in February 1802, and that July King George III presented it to the British Museum. The museum had to park it in a temporary shed on the grounds, because the floors couldn’t take the weight of the sculptures arriving from Egypt.

Fourteen centuries of silence

To see why all this fuss was needed, you have to know how long hieroglyphs had been mute. According to the catalog of the 2022 exhibition the Collège de France held for the bicentennial of the decipherment, the last known hieroglyphic inscription dates to the year 394: a rather clumsily carved text on a wall of the Temple of Isis at Philae, in southern Egypt. After that, nobody wrote them again, and before long nobody could read them.

Over the following centuries, the people who inherited Egypt passed down a warped idea of that writing. The version that reached Europe came from the Greeks, and it held that hieroglyphs were symbols, pictures loaded with hidden meanings, rather than a way of writing sounds. With that notion stuck in everyone’s head, every attempt to read them was doomed. The catalog gives a whole chapter to what it calls the first attempt at decipherment, by Athanasius Kircher, who wrote a treatise titled, no less, Oedipus Aegyptiacus. Oedipus was the guy who solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Kircher did not.

Gustave Flaubert, who had a nasty sense of humor, captured that reputation in his Dictionary of Received Ideas. His entry for hieroglyphs reads: “Ancient language of the Egyptians, invented by the priests to hide their criminal secrets. And to think there are people who understand them! Maybe it’s all a joke, after all?”

The race between London and Paris

Once the stone reached Europe, the race was on. The first to score was an Englishman who wasn’t an Egypt specialist at all but a physicist: Thomas Young. According to the British Museum, Young was one of the first to show that some hieroglyphs on the stone spelled out the sounds of a royal name, Ptolemy, which appears inside an oval frame that Egyptologists call a cartouche. The museum holds a letter of his dated February 10, 1818, asking the traveler William John Bankes to hunt for more examples of those sign groups in Egypt. The meanings Young suggested were mostly right, but he couldn’t explain how the signs got that meaning across.

Bankes did his bit with an obelisk. According to the National Trust, which looks after it, during his travels between 1815 and 1819 he came across a 9-meter, roughly 30-foot, pink granite obelisk that once stood outside the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae. It’s inscribed in Greek and hieroglyphs, and Bankes, who read Greek, picked out the name Cleopatra. That was one more piece which, together with the Rosetta Stone, led to the decipherment.

Getting the obelisk to England was a comedy of errors. On the first try, the pier gave way under its weight and the obelisk slid to the bottom of the Nile. They fished it out, and back in England it caught the eye of the Duke of Wellington, who had served alongside Bankes in the Peninsular War in Spain. Wellington lent his gun carriage to move it from London to Dorset, picked its spot in the garden of Bankes’s estate, and laid the foundation stone on August 17, 1827. It’s still standing there, in an English garden.

Champollion’s “I’ve got it”

Across the Channel was Jean-François Champollion, from Figeac, a small town in the Quercy region of France. The Collège de France catalog says his father was a traveling book peddler and that his mother couldn’t write well enough to sign her own marriage certificate. Her son would end up reading a script that had been dead for fourteen hundred years.

Champollion had one ace, which the British Museum highlights: he knew Coptic. Coptic is Egyptian written with Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic. It was the last stage of the pharaohs’ language and survived in Christian texts. If hieroglyphs wrote sounds, Champollion could recognize the words by sounding them out.

On September 14, 1822, according to his first biographer, Champollion burst into his brother’s office with a bundle of papers, shouted “Je tiens mon affaire, vois !”, roughly “I’ve got it, look!”, and collapsed from exhaustion. That scene comes from A. Rochas, writing in 1856, more than thirty years later, so take it with a grain of salt. What came next is documented. Champollion finished a report on September 22, the famous Lettre à M. Dacier, and presented it to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris on Friday, September 27, 1822. He was 31. In the audience, according to the British Museum, sat his rival, Thomas Young.

How were hieroglyphs deciphered, exactly

Champollion’s insight was that hieroglyphs recorded the sounds of the Egyptian language. He proved it first with the names of foreign rulers, like Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Then he made the big leap: those sound signs weren’t used only for foreign names, but for Egyptian words too. With that, plus Coptic, he could start reading whole inscriptions.

The system that emerged is a mix, and that’s why it held out for so long. The Collège de France catalog boils it down to three kinds of signs. Some stand for sounds, one, two or three consonants at a time. Others stand for a whole word, meaning and pronunciation together. And some sit at the end of a word without making any sound at all, just to flag what kind of word it is: a verb of motion, an abstract idea. Europeans had spent centuries looking only for symbols. It turned out to be a bit of everything.

The Lettre à M. Dacier was published at the end of October 1822 and is usually considered the birth certificate of Egyptology. Champollion kept refining the system for the ten years he had left. He died in 1832, and his brother published his Egyptian dictionary in 1841.

Philadelphia gets in on it

Word of the decipherment crossed the Atlantic, and Americans wanted their own crack at the stone. Among the references the British Museum lists for the Rosetta Stone is an 1858 report from a committee of the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania, set up to translate the inscription. Three and a half decades after Champollion, a committee in Philadelphia was working through the same decree about a 13-year-old king.

What the Rosetta Stone actually says

After all that effort, you’d expect an ancient secret. What the stone really says boils down to a priests’ agreement that reaffirms the royal cult of a teenager and orders copies to be made and handed out to temples. It’s the equivalent of an official decree with a stamp and a signature. Thanks to that bit of red tape repeated in three scripts, everything else could be read afterward.

Hidden under London in World War I

The stone has been on show at the British Museum since 1802 with a single break. In 1917, toward the end of World War I, the museum was worried about bombing raids on London and moved it to safety along with other important objects. It spent the next two years in a station on the Post Office’s underground mail railway, 50 feet below ground at Holborn.

As of 2026 you can see it for free in Room 4 of the museum, the Egyptian sculpture gallery. And in Room 1 there’s a replica you’re actually allowed to touch.

An obelisk that says “forever”

Figeac didn’t forget its hometown hero. After his death, a subscription raised four thousand francs, and in 1835 a granite obelisk 7.80 meters tall, about 25 feet, went up on the town’s Place de la Raison. According to the Collège de France catalog, its faces are blank except for a single hieroglyphic inscription meaning “forever.”