For over a thousand years, the hieroglyphs carved on Egyptian temples and tombs were a mystery. Although travelers could admire the beauty of the symbols, no one could read them. The language of the pharaohs was lost, and with it much of ancient Egypt's history, religion and literature. The key that eventually unlocked this silence was a single slab of dark stone discovered by accident in 1799.
French soldiers serving under Napoleon were rebuilding a fort near the town of Rosetta, on the Egyptian coast, when one of them noticed that a large stone being used in the wall bore strange markings. The stone, which weighed nearly 800 kilograms, was covered in three blocks of writing. The top section was in hieroglyphs. The middle was in an unknown Egyptian script called Demotic. The bottom section, crucially, was in ancient Greek, a language that European scholars could read without difficulty.
The presence of the same text in three versions offered a unique opportunity. If scholars could match the Greek words to the matching groups of hieroglyphs, they might finally break the code. The task, however, was far from simple. Hieroglyphs had long been assumed to be purely symbolic, each sign representing a whole idea rather than a sound. Progress was slow, and many researchers gave up in frustration.
The breakthrough came in 1822, when the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion realised that hieroglyphs could represent sounds as well as ideas, much like the letters of a modern alphabet. Using this insight, he produced the first accurate translation and opened the door to a flood of research. Modern Egyptology, with its museums, universities and excavations, all trace their origins to the accidental find at Rosetta.