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 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