Today in history - 1799

During Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles north of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests of Ptolemy V in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been "dead" for nearly two millennia.

Two decades later, French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion was able to decipher the hieroglyphics using his knowledge of Greek as a guide, and the language and culture of ancient Egypt was suddenly open to scientists as never before.