Rosetta Stone Athanasius Kircher in the 17th, and Georg Zoëga in the 18th. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided critical missing information, gradually revealed by a succession of scholars, that eventually allowed Jean-François Champollion to solve the puzzle that Kircher had called the riddle of the Sphinx. The Greek text on the Rosetta Stone provided the starting point. Ancient Greek was widely known to scholars, but they were not familiar with details of its use in the Hellenistic period as a government language in Ptolemaic Egypt; large-scale discoveries of Greek papyri were a long way in the future. Thus,
The Rosetta Foundation powered by SOLAS. The foundation is named after the Rosetta Stone. The aim of The Rosetta Foundation is to provide information to as many people as possible, in their own languages. Some of the core concept are described in a paper published by Reinhard Schäler: "Information Sharing across Languages". The European launch took place at the AGIS ’09 conference in Limerick, Ireland on 21–23 September 2009. The President of the University of Limerick, Professor Don Barry, announced the launch of The Rosetta Foundation on 21 September 2009 during his welcoming address to the AGIS '09 delegates. AGIS, Action for Global