Today in History—September 27: The Rosetta Stone Is Decoded

In 1799 a Frenchman found a mysterious stone tablet near Rosetta, Egypt. On this day in 1822, the world learned what it meant.

This was the Rosetta Stone: an irregularly shaped block of black granite that bore the same piece of text in three scripts—none of which (hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic, and ancient Greek) were decipherable by modern audiences. Upon the stone’s discovery, the world of Egyptology buzzed with questions. How old was the inscription? Who wrote it? And—the topic on everyone’s mind—what did it say?

The first person to make progress on deciphering the stone was Thomas Young, a British Egyptologist who was also a respected physician and physicist. (Busy guy!) Young figured out that the stone’s six identical cartouches (oval figures enclosing hieroglyphs) represented the name Ptolemy: an ancient king who ruled Egypt from 205–180 bce.

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Since Young had other things to do, like measuring the size of molecules, he treated the Rosetta Stone as a side project. He had no one to blame but himself, then, when his work was eclipsed by Jean-François Champollion of France. A linguistic genius and fierce rival of Young’s, Champollion became the first to recognize that different types of hieroglyphs had different functions: some represented letters, some syllables, and some entire objects or concepts.

That realization cracked the case wide open. On September 27, 1822, Champollion announced to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris (a group that included Young) that he had deciphered the Rosetta Stone. The world of Egyptology changed forever.

So what was the meaning of this mysterious, ancient inscription? Just your average political propaganda. The text, composed by ancient Egyptian priests, invites its readers to praise Ptolemy V, the “ever-living, beloved,” “SAVIOR,” “god who maketh himself manifest,” and “VICTORIOUS ONE” whom Young had first identified as the stone’s subject.

If that disappoints you, don’t worry: What matters in this story isn’t what the Rosetta Stone says. What matters is that deciphering the Rosetta Stone established the basis for the translation of all future Egyptian hieroglyphic texts—even the ones we haven’t discovered yet.