for 1400 years, no one knew how to read egyptian hieroglyphs. during napoleon bonaparte’s egyptian campaign, a french soldier discovered a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing. the irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: greek, egyptian hieroglyphics, and egyptian demotic. the ancient greek on the stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests of Ptolemy V in the second century B.C. more startlingly it announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. thus the artifact held the key to solving the riddle of a written language that had been “dead” for nearly two millennia.

on this day in 1799, the rosetta stone was discovered.