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,
Rosetta Stone for return of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon and similar requests to other museums around the world, in 2002 over 30 of the world's leading museums — including the British Museum, the Louvre, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum in New York City — issued a joint statement declaring that "objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values reflective of that earlier era" and that "museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation". The Digital Rosetta Stone Project is a collaboration