Rosetta Stone Rosetta Stone The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, found in 1799, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic script and Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree has only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, thereby opening a window into ancient Egyptian history. The stone, carved during the Hellenistic period, is believed to
Rosetta Stone between the University of Leipzig's Digital Humanities Chair and the Institute of Egyptology; and the British Museum and the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology Project, to make available an annotated transcription of each of the three versions of the text, as well as providing them in XML format. High-resolution images and a high-resolution 3D model of the stone will also be produced. The term "Rosetta stone" has been used idiomatically to represent a crucial key in the process of decryption of encoded information, especially when a small but representative sample is recognised as the clue to understanding a larger whole. According