1In seventeen ninety-nine, French soldiers discovered a strange black stone near the Egyptian town of Rosetta.
2The stone carried the same official message, carefully carved in three completely different ancient scripts.
3Nobody alive at that time could read the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphs carved along the top.
4Scholars immediately realised that this stone might be the key to finally unlocking their secrets.
5A brilliant young French genius named Jean-Francois Champollion devoted his entire life to the puzzle.
6He patiently compared the hieroglyphs with the Greek text, which scholars could already read fluently.
7After many years of frustrating failure, Champollion discovered that some of the signs represented spoken sounds.
8This breakthrough suddenly allowed historians to read thousands of forgotten Egyptian texts for the first time.
9For the first time in history, the voices of the pharaohs spoke again across the centuries.
10Today, the Rosetta Stone remains one of the most visited objects in the British Museum.