Rosetta_stone

After the French were defeated by the British in 1801, the stone was seized as a prize of war and transported to the in London, where it has remained since 1802. A high-stakes intellectual race began between two rivals:

: An English physicist who first identified that hieroglyphs in oval frames (cartouches) were phonetic spellings of royal names like "Ptolemy". rosetta_stone

In , during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, French soldiers were digging foundations to shore up the fort’s defenses. Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard spotted the dark granodiorite slab built into an old wall and immediately realized its potential importance. Because scholars already knew how to read Ancient Greek, they hoped this stone would finally provide the "key" to translating the mysterious hieroglyphs, which had been unreadable for nearly 1,400 years. The Great Decipherment Race After the French were defeated by the British