Welcome to Slow English FM. This is Daily Random Facts, where one surprising fact opens a door to a bigger story. Today, it is a stone that helped scholars read ancient Egyptian writing.

EmmaThe Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic, and Greek. A script is a way of writing a language. Hieroglyphs and Demotic were ways to write Egyptian, while Greek was a different language. Comparing the versions helped scholars decipher hieroglyphs, or work out how that writing system works.

French soldiers found the broken stone in July 1799 while rebuilding a fort at Rashid, a port in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Europeans called the city Rosetta, giving the stone its familiar name. The inscription was a priestly decree, a formal message drawn up by Egyptian priests.

EmmaThe decree was drawn up in 196 BC during the rule of Ptolemy V. It praised the king and listed honors given to him by the priesthood. At that time, Greek-speaking Macedonian rulers governed Egypt. Priests followed a Greek practice of setting up decrees and added Egyptian versions for Egyptian readers.

The Greek text gave scholars a starting point because they knew its language. But matching it with the Egyptian scripts was not a simple word-for-word task. Egyptian signs could represent sounds, and Jean-François Champollion, a French scholar, used his knowledge of Coptic, a later form of Egyptian, to connect sounds and words across the scripts.

EmmaChampollion built on earlier work, including work by Thomas Young, who had made progress in reading Demotic and the name Ptolemy. Comparing the royal names Ptolemy and Cleopatra helped Champollion identify a shared, lion-like sign as the letter “L.” The British Museum dates his key findings to September 1822.

Champollion tested his method on the name Ramesses. He read a sun-disc sign as “Ra” and checked it against another inscription, where a seated god sign stood for Ra. The British Museum says deciphering hieroglyphs opened access to about three thousand years of Egyptian history, literature, religion, art, and architecture.

EmmaAfter the French army’s defeat in Egypt, terms signed in 1801 transferred the Rosetta Stone and other Egyptian objects to British possession.

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