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,
Philae (spacecraft) the Philae obelisk, which bears a bilingual inscription and was used along with the Rosetta Stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. "Philae" was monitored and operated from DLR's Lander Control Center in Cologne, Germany. "Philae" mission was to land successfully on the surface of a comet, attach itself, and transmit data about the comet's composition. The "Rosetta" spacecraft and "Philae" lander were launched on an Ariane 5G+ rocket from French Guiana on 2 March 2004, 07:17 UTC, and travelled for 3,907 days (10.7 years) to Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Unlike the "Deep Impact" probe, which by design struck comet Tempel 1's nucleus on 4