15 Solid Facts About the Rosetta Stone

Found on July 15, 1799, by French soldiers on a mission in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone was a most fortunate find. The stone’s three blocks of alternating script provided the key to deciphering hieroglyphs, the ancient Egyptian writing system that had puzzled scholars for centuries. Its value as a translation tool is world-famous—but the turbulent history surrounding its discovery and translation is more obscure.

1. The Rosetta Stone’s text is a royal decree venerating a teenage king.
2. The stone displays three different scripts.
3. It weighs 1676 pounds.
4. The Rosetta Stone spent centuries lodged inside a fortress wall.
5. Napoleon led a scientific survey of Egyptian monuments.
6. One of the engineers immediately realized the Rosetta Stone’s value.
7. Then Britain seized it.
8. The Rosetta Stone has been in the British Museum since 1802.
9. Visitors used to be able to touch it.
10. It took scholars more than two decades to decipher its text.
11. Champollion fainted after making a crucial discovery.
12. The Rosetta Stone spent two years in a tube station.
13. France got it back—for a month.
14. There is no definitive English translation of the Rosetta Stone’s inscriptions.
15. Egypt wants it back.

The Rosetta Stone’s text is a royal decree venerating a teenage king.

The Rosetta Stone is part of a larger display slab, or stele, that was likely situated inside a temple near el-Rashid (Rosetta), where it was discovered. It broke apart centuries ago. Written in 196 BCE, it’s a bit of ancient propaganda—officially known as the Memphis Decree—affirming the legitimacy and goodness of then-king Ptolemy V, who had assumed the throne at the age of 5 (after his parents were murdered in a court conspiracy) and received his official coronation at age 12. Given his youth and turmoil in the empire, Ptolemy probably needed a boost from his priests. “[He] has dedicated to the temples revenues in money and corn,” the inscribers wrote on the stone, “and has undertaken much outlay to bring Egypt into prosperity.”

The stone displays three different scripts.

Despite its incomplete state, the Rosetta Stone crucially preserves the three languages from the original stele: hieroglyphs, the sacred script of the empire; Egyptian demotic, the common language; and Greek, which was the official language under Macedonian-ruled Egypt. All three convey the same royal decree, with slight variations, indicating the message was widely read and circulated. To the stone’s French discoverers, this meant it could serve as a translation key, with the Greek portion, in particular, helping scholars crack the hieroglyphs, which had died out around the 4th century after Rome’s rulers declared it a pagan art.

It weighs 1676 pounds.

The Rosetta Stone is a beast. It is made out of a stone called granodiorite, a type of granite containing large quartz and feldspar crystals, and has a maximum length of 112.3 centimeters (44.2 inches), width of 75.7 centimeters (29.8 inches) and thickness of 28.4 centimeters (11.2 inches). It weighs nearly three-quarters of a ton.

The Rosetta Stone spent centuries lodged inside a fortress wall.

Many of Egypt’s temples were destroyed in the 4th century under Roman Emperor Theodosius I, and for years afterwards the ruins served as quarries for the country’s occupiers. Before the French army recovered it in the late 18th century, the immensely valuable Rosetta Stone was part of a wall inside an Ottoman fortress.

Napoleon led a scientific survey of Egyptian monuments.

During the French Revolutionary Wars, when France and Great Britain were enemies, French forces moved in to Egypt to block British trade routes with India and establish economic ties with Middle East nations. Napoleon Bonaparte, then a general who led the Egyptian Campaign, was an intellectual and sought to systematically catalog Egypt's cultural heritage (and take a lot of it back to France). With a corps of naturalists, engineers, historians, political scientists, and art scholars, Napoleon established the Institut d’Égypte in 1798 to coordinate the investigations. Napoleon instructed officers and soldiers to be on the lookout for any interesting artifacts.

One of the engineers immediately realized the Rosetta Stone’s value.

While reconstructing portions of the Ottoman fort, which the army renamed Fort Julien, engineer Pierre-François Bouchard noticed a slab of granite sticking out of the ground. Upon closer inspection, he saw it contained varying lines of script, and immediately informed General Jacques-François Menou, one of the chief generals in Egypt who happened to be at the site. Soldiers excavated the stone and later presented to Napoleon.

Then Britain seized it.

After defeating Napoleon’s army at the Siege of Alexandria in 1801, British forces commandeered many of the Egyptian artifacts that the Institut d’Égypte had collected during the previous few years, including the Rosetta Stone. General Menou tried, unsuccessfully, to claim the stone as his personal property. Instead, British officials demanded the Rosetta Stone as part of France’s official surrender and in exchange for allowing Menou’s troops to evacuate the city.

The Rosetta Stone has been in the British Museum since 1802.

After securing the stone, British officials took it to London’s British Museum, which had opened in 1757 as the world’s first public national museum. The original location was a 17th-century mansion called Montagu House. The Rosetta Stone and other artifacts soon proved too heavy for the home’s structure, however, and were moved to the museum’s current location on Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury.

Visitors used to be able to touch it.

For decades, the Rosetta Stone sat uncovered in the museum. Though they were discouraged from doing so, visitors would walk up and touch the stone, often tracing the writing with their fingers—a scenario that would no doubt horrify modern curators. Eventually, the museum realized this probably wasn’t good for the longevity of the artifact and placed it beneath a glass case.

It took scholars more than two decades to decipher its text.

Scholars were able to quickly translate the 54 lines of Greek and 32 lines of demotic inscribed on the stone. But fully deciphering the 14 lines of hieroglyphs took years. Part of the problem was a prevailing notion that hieroglyphs was a symbolic writing system when in fact it was a largely phonetic one. Another problem was that British and French scholars had not forgotten their country’s fraught claims to the stone, setting up an international rivalry in the race to decode its text. British polymath Thomas Young made a major breakthrough when he discovered the significance of the cartouches, which are circles drawn around proper names, and published his findings in 1814.

Champollion fainted after making a crucial discovery.

With Young’s clues, French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion took up the mantle and made slow, painstaking progress towards decipherment. One day, he had a major breakthrough: A sun symbol, he realized, corresponded to the Egyptian word ra, or “sun,” which formed the beginning of Ramses, the name for a pharaoh closely associated with the sun god, Amun-Ra. Realizing this meant hieroglyphs was a primarily phonetic writing system, Champollion raced to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, where his brother worked. “I have it!” he supposedly cried upon entering his brother’s office, and promptly fainted.

Champollion continued working on the puzzle and delivered a full translation in 1822. From there, further understanding of ancient Egypt’s language and culture flourished.

The Rosetta Stone spent two years in a tube station.

During World War I, bombing scares prompted British Museum officials to move the Rosetta Stone, along with other select artifacts, to a Postal Tube Railway station (like a subway, but for mail) situated 50 feet underground in Holborn.

France got it back—for a month.

After discovering the stone, then losing it, France finally got a chance to host the artifact in 1972. The occasion was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Champollion’s “Lettre à M. Dacier,” the published treatise that outlined his translation of the Rosetta Stone’s hieroglyphs. The stone drew crowds from far and wide to the Louvre and rumors hinted that France might just hold onto the Rosetta Stone, but it was returned to the British Museum after one month.

There is no definitive English translation of the Rosetta Stone’s inscriptions.

Because each of the Rosetta Stone’s three sections is slightly different, and due to the subjective nature of translation in general, there’s no single, authoritative translation of the royal decree. This English translation of the demotic portion {PDF} isn’t exactly a riveting read.

Egypt wants it back.

In 2003, the country requested the return of the Rosetta Stone to its original home, citing the artifact as a key piece of Egyptian cultural identity. Officials and the public, including prominent archaeologist and former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass, have continued to press the British Museum in subsequent years. The museum has declined each request, but did give Egypt a full-size fiberglass replica of the stone in 2005.

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A version of this story was published in 2016; it has been updated for 2025.