When Was the Rosetta Stone Found?

On 15 July 1799, during the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in Egypt, a French soldier named Pierre-François Bouchard found a grey granodiorite slab inscribed with the same decree in three scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. The Greek text provided the key to deciphering the long-lost hieroglyphic script. Jean-François Champollion finally cracked the code in 1822, opening the door to understanding thousands of years of Egyptian history. The stone has been in the British Museum since 1802.