One stone, cracked in three scripts, unlocked 3,000 years of silence

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphics, Demotic and Greek. Because scholars could already read Greek, Jean-François Champollion used it in 1822 to finally crack hieroglyphic writing, reopening a written record of ancient Egypt that had been unreadable for over a thousand years.

— Jean-François Champollion, Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques — 1822