In 196 BCE, masons at a Delta temple set a granodiorite slab upright and had scribes chisel a royal decree for King Ptolemy V in three scripts—hieroglyphic for the gods, Demotic for everyday use, and Greek for the ruling elite—each version mirroring the others.Centuries rolled by; the temple fell silent, the stone toppled, and builders later packed it into an Ottoman-era fort near Rashid, its carved faces buried in the wall.On a hot July day in 1799, Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard prised the block from the rubble while Napoleon’s engineers strengthened Fort Julien, instantly realising its scholarly promise.Copies raced across Europe, fueling a contest to crack the lost tongue of the pharaohs; the British seized the original under the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801 and placed it in the British Museum a year later.By 1803 the Greek text stood translated; in 1822 Jean-François Champollion linked phonetic signs in Demotic and hieroglyphs, proving both scripts could spell sounds, and within two more years he read native Egyptian words aloud for the first time in nearly fifteen hundred years.The wedge-shaped fragment became the lever that pried open Egypt’s literature and history, and ever since, people have called any crucial breakthrough a ‘Rosetta Stone’ in its honour.