Q: What is the historical importance of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone?
A: The Rosetta Stone was ancient Egyptian stele (196 BC), now preserved at the British Museum. It was found by Pierre-Francois Bouchard, a French artillery officer, near the Rosetta mouth of the river Nile, in 1799. The importance of this stele comes from the fact that this slab of black basalt was inscribed with fragments of fourteen lines of hieroglyphics, thirty two lines of demotic—a type of ancient Egyptian script—and fifty four lines of Greek. In other words, since it presented the same text in all three scripts, it provided scholars with the key to decipher the hitherto untranslated Ancient Egyptian language. It was Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), a French classical scholar and philologist, who in 1822 published the first translation of the Rosetta Stone. Thus, the translation of the Rosetta Stone changed Egyptology by enabling the world to finally decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs and to read the ancient Egyptian language.