Rosetta of a Coptic toponym, "Trashit". "Rosetta" or "Rosette" was the name used by the French at the time of Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt and thus became eponymous of the Rosetta Stone (), which was found by French soldiers at the nearby Fort Julien in 1799. The site of Rosetta was inhabited throughout the history of Ancient Egypt, then known as "", a hieratic word meaning "the populace", under Menes reign. In the Ptolemaic era, the town was renamed to "Bolbitine" ("Bolbitinum, Bolbitinon", the name of one of the seven mouths of the Nile in Herodotus). In Christian Egypt, the
Rosetta Stone both languages. From this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters "k l e o p a t r a" (in today's transliteration "q l i҆ w p ꜣ d r ꜣ.t"). On the basis of this and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters, which appears in his famous 1822 ""Lettre à M. Dacier"" sent to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the Paris Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and immediately published by the Académie. In the postscript Champollion notes that similar phonetic characters seemed to occur in both Greek and Egyptian names, a