The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite slab carved in 196 BCE with one priestly decree written three times: in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in Demotic and in ancient Greek. Because scholars could read the Greek, the stone gave them a parallel text against which to test the two Egyptian scripts, and in 1822 Jean-François Champollion used it, with other inscriptions and his knowledge of Coptic, to show how hieroglyphs actually work. It has been in the British Museum since 1802, and Egyptian campaigners have asked for its return.
Hieroglyphs were used for well over three thousand years, and for roughly fourteen centuries after the last one was carved nobody could read them. Everything known today about the Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead or the names of the pharaohs depends on the decipherment this broken stone made possible, and the stone now sits at the centre of an argument about who should own it.
What is the Rosetta Stone?
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stela, a standing inscribed slab, made of grey and pink granodiorite. The British Museum's collection record (object EA24) gives its maximum dimensions as 112.3 cm high, 75.7 cm wide and 28.4 cm thick, and it weighs approximately 760 kg. Its top is broken away, so the hieroglyphic section survives only in part.
The text is a decree passed by a council of priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 BCE, affirming the royal cult of Ptolemy V, then about 13 years old, on the anniversary of his coronation and listing the benefits he had granted the temples. Copies were to be set up in temples across Egypt, so it was written in three scripts:
- Hieroglyphs (top, 14 surviving lines): the formal sacred script suited to a priestly decree.
- Demotic (middle, 32 lines): the cursive script used for everyday Egyptian documents.
- Greek (bottom, 54 lines): the language of the Ptolemaic government.
The content is ordinary state business. What made it extraordinary was the same text in one script scholars could read and two they could not.
How was the Rosetta Stone found?
French soldiers found the stone on 15 July 1799 while digging foundations for an addition to Fort Julien, near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the western Nile Delta. It had been reused as building stone in an old wall. The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, recognised its importance, and it passed to the scholars travelling with Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition.
The French did not keep it. After the French army in Egypt was defeated, the stone became British property under the 1801 Treaty (or Capitulation) of Alexandria. It reached Britain in 1802 and has been in the British Museum since that year.
Who deciphered hieroglyphs, Young or Champollion?
Champollion produced the decipherment, but the English physician and physicist Thomas Young made important first steps, and the two men's dispute over credit lasted for the rest of their lives.
Thomas Young's first steps
Young worked on the Rosetta Stone from 1814. His most solid achievement was on the Demotic text, where he matched sign groups to words in the Greek and showed that Demotic mixed sound signs with idea signs. In the hieroglyphic section, he argued that the oval rings, the cartouches, enclosed royal names, and he demonstrated that some of the signs inside one cartouche spelled out the sounds of the name Ptolemy. He set out his conclusions in the article "Egypt" for the supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1819. He found the correct sound values of a handful of signs, but he treated phonetic spelling as a device reserved for foreign names and did not work out the grammar.
Champollion's breakthrough
Jean-François Champollion, a French scholar who had studied Coptic since his youth, took the decisive step in September 1822. Testing his sign values on new copies of inscriptions from Abu Simbel, he read two native Egyptian royal names. One began with a sun disc, which he knew from Coptic as ra, followed by signs he read as ms and s: Ramesses. The other began with an ibis, the sacred bird of Thoth, followed by the same ms sign: Thutmose. These were Egyptian names of pharaohs who reigned more than a thousand years before the Ptolemies, so the phonetic principle ran through the whole script.
The breakthrough is dated to 14 September 1822; according to the familiar account, Champollion ran to tell his brother and collapsed. On 27 September 1822 he presented his results to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris in the Lettre à M. Dacier, and his Précis du système hiéroglyphique (1824) explained how phonetic and ideographic signs worked together.
Why Coptic was the key
Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in a Greek-based alphabet, survived in the liturgy of the Coptic Church. Once Champollion had a sound value, he could recognise the Egyptian word behind it; Young could not. That is why Egyptologists credit Champollion with the decipherment while acknowledging Young's early work.
How do Egyptian hieroglyphs work?
Hieroglyphs are a mixed system: some signs stand for whole words, some for sounds, and some are silent markers that clarify meaning. The Egyptians called the script medu netjer, "the god's words". The Greek word hieroglyphika, "sacred carvings", came later.
Logograms, phonograms and determinatives
- Logograms write a whole word with a picture of it or of something closely related: a sun disc for "sun" or the sun god Ra, a house plan for "house".
- Phonograms stand for sounds. Twenty-four uniliteral signs each represent a single consonant and form what is sometimes called the hieroglyphic "alphabet". Biliteral signs represent two consonants and triliteral signs three. Uniliteral signs were often added as phonetic complements to confirm a reading.
- Determinatives come at the end of a word and are not pronounced. A seated man marks words about men, a seated woman words about women, a scroll words for abstract ideas. Because nearly every word has one, determinatives also act as word dividers in a script that has no spaces or punctuation.
No vowels
Hieroglyphs normally record consonants only, much like Hebrew or Arabic script. Egyptologists insert a conventional "e" between consonants so that words can be spoken aloud, which is why the same king can appear as Amenhotep or Amenophis.
Which way to read
Hieroglyphs can run in rows or in columns, and from right to left or left to right. The rule is simple: people, animals and birds face the beginning of the line, so the reader reads into their faces. Right to left was most common, but artists flipped inscriptions freely for symmetry.
Cartouches
A cartouche is an oval ring with a bar at one end, shenu in Egyptian, that encloses a royal name. Kings wrote two of their five names in cartouches: the throne name and the birth name. Cartouches were the natural place for Young and Champollion to begin, and they are still the first signs visitors learn to spot, as in the long row of names on the Abydos King List.
How many signs were there?
During the Middle Kingdom, the classical stage of the language, the system used about 900 distinct signs. In the Greco-Roman period, when temple priests developed elaborate spellings at sites such as Edfu and Dendera, it grew to more than 5,000.
What are hieratic and Demotic?
Hieratic and Demotic are the cursive relatives of hieroglyphs. Hieratic developed alongside hieroglyphs from the beginning of Egyptian writing and was written in ink with a reed brush, mostly on papyrus and ostraca (pottery and limestone flakes). It was the working script of administration and literature, and many funerary papyri, including copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, were written in hieratic or in simplified cursive hieroglyphs.
Demotic, the middle script on the Rosetta Stone, began to replace hieratic for everyday documents during the reign of Psamtik I (664–610 BCE) and remained in use into the fifth century CE. For a shorter introduction to these differences, see six facts about ancient Egypt's hieroglyphic writing.
How was the ability to read hieroglyphs lost?
The knowledge died with the temple priesthoods. The last known dated hieroglyphic inscription, the graffito of Esmet-Akhom, was carved at the temple of Isis on Philae on 24 August 394 CE, beside a figure of the Nubian god Mandulis. As Christianity spread, Coptic took over and the old scripts fell silent.
What survived were misreadings. The Hieroglyphica attributed to Horapollo, probably written in the fifth century CE, explained signs as allegorical symbols. It preserved some genuine meanings but none of the phonetic system, and it shaped Renaissance thinking. In the seventeenth century the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher rightly linked Coptic to ancient Egyptian, yet his "translations" in Oedipus Aegyptiacus were mystical allegories with no basis in the texts. The Rosetta Stone forced scholars to treat hieroglyphs as a language with sounds and grammar.
Should the Rosetta Stone be returned to Egypt?
That is a live debate. Egyptian campaigners argue that the stone left Egypt as a spoil of a European war in which Egyptians had no say, and belongs in the country whose history it records. The British Museum's position rests on the legal record: its collection entry states that the stone became British property under the 1801 Treaty of Alexandria. The museum is also bound by the British Museum Act 1963, which bars its trustees from disposing of objects in the collection except in narrow circumstances.
The question is not new. In 2005 Zahi Hawass, then head of Egypt's antiquities service, asked for a three-month loan, and in 2009 he offered to drop his claim if the stone were lent for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum. In August 2022, ahead of the bicentenary of the decipherment, Hawass announced a petition calling for the return of the Rosetta Stone, the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin and the Dendera Zodiac in the Louvre. The archaeologist Monica Hanna launched a separate petition the same year, which drew thousands of signatures, and in February 2023 a petition to the UK Parliament was launched with Hawass's backing. The British Museum responded that the stone, shown beside objects from other ancient cultures, gives visitors wider context and remains open to researchers.
The British Museum marked the bicentenary with an exhibition on hieroglyphs and the decipherment, from 13 October 2022 to 19 February 2023. The Grand Egyptian Museum was fully inaugurated on 1 November 2025, giving campaigners a ready home to point to. The stone remains in London.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson approaches hieroglyphs as a sacred script connected with Thoth, whom he calls Tehuti, the god Egyptian tradition credited with inventing writing. The link itself is ancient: the Egyptians called the script "the god's words", and Thoth was the patron of scribes. Carson goes further than mainstream Egyptology in treating Thoth as a real teacher of Atlantean origin rather than only a deity, a position set out in who Thoth was and how he became Hermes Trismegistus.
He reads Egyptian texts through the lens of the Emerald Tablets, the subject of his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, treating the written record as one stream in a longer tradition of knowledge attributed to Thoth. The distinction matters: the decipherment is settled philology, and Carson's interpretation concerns the meaning and origin of the wisdom the texts carry, not how the signs are read. The difference between the real Egyptian literature attributed to Thoth and the later legends is covered in the Book of Thoth explained.
Watch, read and go deeper
The 4BK TV series Egyptian Mystery School explores the temple tradition, Thoth and the priesthoods whose script the Rosetta Stone helped to recover. For cartouches and reliefs in context, the guide to Abydos and the Temple of Seti I covers the King List and the so-called helicopter glyphs, a lesson in how re-carved hieroglyphs can mislead. To see the inscriptions in person, look at the 4biddenknowledge tours to Egypt. Every related article, from the pyramids to the gods, is collected on the Ancient Egypt topic hub.
Frequently asked questions
What does the Rosetta Stone say?
It records a decree issued by Egyptian priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 BCE, affirming the royal cult of the young Ptolemy V and listing the benefits he granted the temples. The same text appears in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek.
Where is the Rosetta Stone now?
The Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum in London, where it has been since 1802, catalogued as object EA24. The museum holds that it became British property under the 1801 Treaty of Alexandria, while Egyptian campaigners continue to call for its return.
Can anyone read hieroglyphs today?
Yes. Egyptologists have built full grammars and dictionaries since the 1820s, and students learn Middle Egyptian from textbooks such as Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar and James P. Allen's Middle Egyptian. Vowels remain partly uncertain because the script records only consonants.
Did Thomas Young or Champollion decipher hieroglyphs?
Champollion is credited with the decipherment because in 1822 he showed that phonetic signs ran through the whole system, including native Egyptian names, and in 1824 he explained how sound signs and idea signs worked together. Young made real early progress, especially on Demotic and the name Ptolemy, and the two men disputed credit for the rest of their lives.
Why is it called the Rosetta Stone?
It is named after Rosetta, the European name for the town of Rashid in the Nile Delta, where French soldiers found it in July 1799. The name is now used in English for any key to a previously closed field of knowledge.
Sources and further reading
- British Museum, collection record EA24, "The Rosetta Stone"
- Jean-François Champollion, Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques (1822) and Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens (1824)
- Thomas Young, "Egypt", Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1819)
- Richard Parkinson, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (British Museum Press, 1999)
- Andrew Robinson, Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion (Thames & Hudson, 2012)
- Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar (3rd edition, Griffith Institute, 1957)
- James P. Allen, Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge University Press)
