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 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