1799 - The Rosetta Stone

In 1799, one of the most startling archaeological discoveries in the history of mankind was made.  In mid-July, in the western Egyptian delta, an officer of engineers in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, spied a slab of black stone which had been built into an old wall that had been demolished to expand a fort near the town of Rosetta.  This officer of engineers, a certain Pierre-Francois Bouchard, was quickly taken aback by the fact that this black stone had writing on it, writing which was not in just one script but in three.

The black granite stone that Bouchard found came to be called the Rosetta Stone, and the French scholars who accompanied Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, immediately recognized its importance.  The Rosetta Stone was important because it contained the same message in three scripts, demotic Egyptian, Greek and hieroglyphic Egyptian.  At the time of the stone’s discovery, the language of ancient Egypt had been extinct for over a thousand years.  With its discovery, for the first time, modern scholars were provided a key to unlocking the mysteries of the ancient Egyptian world.

It would take 20 years for scholars to fully understand the nature of the key and to begin to properly utilize it.  However, once they did turn the key, the door to a new world -- the ancient world of Egypt -- was opened to them and with it came a greater understanding of the past.