On July 15, 1799, the Rosetta Stone was found, unlocking the secrets of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Imagine unearthing a key that unlocks a hidden world- the excitement would be palpable. That’s exactly what happened on July 15, 1799, near a small town called Rosetta in Egypt.

French soldiers stationed there were busy fortifying Rosetta. That’s when officer Pierre François Xavier Bouchard stumbled upon something far more extraordinary- the Rosetta Stone.

This wasn’t your average rock.

This black basalt slab, about the size of a large coffee table, measured about 44 inches (1.12 meters) tall, 30 inches (76.2 cm) wide, and 11 inches (27.94 cm), thick. Weighing approximately 760 kilograms (1,680 lb), it was inscribed with the same message in three different languages: majestic hieroglyphs, the simpler Demotic script, and well-understood Ancient Greek.

These parallel texts held the potential to crack a code that had baffled historians for centuries: Egyptian hieroglyphs.

It was like having a crib sheet for an ancient language exam.

Unlocking the secrets of the Rosetta Stone wasn’t a quick feat. It took brilliant minds like Jean-François Champollion years of painstaking work. Champollion finally achieved a breakthrough in 1822 after carefully comparing the symbols across the different scripts.

He identified the names of Ptolemaic kings written in both hieroglyphs and Greek. This allowed him to assign phonetic values to some hieroglyphs.

This initial crack in the code swung open the door of Ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs began to reveal their secrets, showing the stories on temple walls, the pronouncements of pharaohs, and the daily lives of ordinary Egyptians.

The Rosetta Stone remains one of the most significant archaeological finds today. It’s housed in the British Museum where it continues to fascinate and educate visitors from all around the world.