The Stone That Spoke Three Languages

In July 1799, French soldiers who had come to Egypt with Napoleon Bonaparte's army were rebuilding an old fort near the town of Rashid, known to Europeans as Rosetta. In one of its walls, they uncovered a broken slab of dark stone. An officer named Bouchard immediately recognized that the inscription carved across its surface might be important, and the stone was sent to the scholars who had accompanied the expedition. What they were looking at, though no one could yet prove it, was the key to a writing system that had been unreadable for well over a thousand years.

The text, it was later established, was a decree issued by a council of priests in 196 BC in honor of the young king Ptolemy V. What made it extraordinary was that the same decree had been carved three times, in three different scripts: hieroglyphs at the top, a flowing everyday script now called Demotic in the middle, and ancient Greek at the bottom. Strictly speaking, then, the stone speaks two languages rather than three, since hieroglyphs and Demotic are both ways of writing Egyptian. But the Greek could be read without difficulty, and scholars reasoned, correctly, that it would act as a translation of the other two. The stone itself, a slab of granodiorite weighing roughly 760 kilograms, is far from complete: only the last fourteen lines of the hieroglyphic text survive, compared with thirty-two in Demotic and fifty-four in Greek.

The stone did not remain in French hands for long. After the French army in Egypt was defeated, it was handed over to the British under the terms of the surrender in 1801, and it has been displayed in the British Museum in London since 1802. Fortunately, copies of the inscription had already been made and were circulated among scholars across Europe, so the race to decipher it could begin almost at once.

It proved far harder than anyone expected. For centuries, it had been widely assumed that hieroglyphs were purely symbolic, each picture representing an idea rather than a sound, and this assumption led many brilliant minds in the wrong direction. Some progress was made by the English scientist Thomas Young, who, building on the earlier idea that the oval rings known as cartouches enclosed royal names, correctly identified the name of Ptolemy. Yet it was a young Frenchman, Champollion, who would eventually crack the code.

Champollion was uniquely prepared for the task. He had studied a remarkable number of ancient languages and, crucially, had mastered Coptic, the late form of the Egyptian language, written in an alphabet based largely on Greek. Comparing the cartouches of Ptolemy and of Cleopatra, which appeared on another monument, he was able to match individual signs to individual sounds. The decisive moment came in September 1822, when he examined copies of inscriptions from a temple at Abu Simbel and found that he could read the names of Ramesses and Thutmose, pharaohs who had ruled long before the Greeks arrived. Hieroglyphs, he realized, had never been purely symbolic: they combined signs for sounds with signs for ideas, and they had done so from the beginning.

Later that month, he set out his discoveries in a letter that was presented to the Academy of Inscriptions in Paris, and the study of ancient Egypt was never the same again. For the first time in many centuries, the Egyptians could be heard, so to speak, in their own words. It is said that on the day of his breakthrough, Champollion ran to his brother's office, cried out "Je tiens l'affaire!" ("I've got it!") and promptly fainted, needing several days to recover. Whether that story is entirely accurate, nobody can now say for certain, but it has been told so often that it has become part of the legend of the stone itself.