Rosetta of a Coptic toponym, "Trashit". "Rosetta" or "Rosette" was the name used by the French at the time of Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt and thus became eponymous of the Rosetta Stone (), which was found by French soldiers at the nearby Fort Julien in 1799. The site of Rosetta was inhabited throughout the history of Ancient Egypt, then known as "", a hieratic word meaning "the populace", under Menes reign. In the Ptolemaic era, the town was renamed to "Bolbitine" ("Bolbitinum, Bolbitinon", the name of one of the seven mouths of the Nile in Herodotus). In Christian Egypt, the
Rosetta Stone is now used in other contexts as the name for the essential clue to a new field of knowledge. The Rosetta Stone is listed as "a stone of black granodiorite, bearing three inscriptions ... found at Rosetta" in a contemporary catalogue of the artefacts discovered by the French expedition and surrendered to British troops in 1801. At some period after its arrival in London, the inscriptions on the stone were coloured in white chalk to make them more legible, and the remaining surface was covered with a layer of carnauba wax designed to protect the Rosetta Stone from visitors' fingers.