Rosetta Stone the Napoleonic Wars, a long-running dispute over the relative value of Young and Champollion's contributions to the decipherment and, since 2003, demands for the stone's return to Egypt. Two other fragmentary copies of the same decree were discovered later, and several similar Egyptian bilingual or trilingual inscriptions are now known, including two slightly earlier Ptolemaic decrees (the Decree of Canopus in 238 BC, and the Memphis decree of Ptolemy IV, c. 218 BC). The Rosetta Stone is, therefore, no longer unique, but it was the essential key to modern understanding of Ancient Egyptian literature and civilisation. The term "Rosetta Stone"
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