The same decree carved in three scripts let one scholar finally crack hieroglyphs

French soldiers found the Rosetta Stone in 1799 bearing a single decree repeated in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic script, and Ancient Greek, which scholars could already read. Jean-François Champollion spent over a decade comparing the three versions, recognising that hieroglyphs mixed phonetic sounds with symbolic signs, and announced the decipherment in 1822, reopening three thousand years of Egyptian writing that had been unreadable since antiquity.

— Jean-François Champollion, Lettre à M. Dacier — 1822 letter announcing the decipherment