British Museum

What we preferred at the British Museum was the Rosetta Stone. Firstly because it was stricking to see this famous stone in real. Moreover, because it's a very important part of the history. Indeed, the Rosetta Stone bears an inscription in different languages, which permitted to decode the hieroglyphs.

 

In fact, it's the only surviving fragment of a longer stela, recording a decree dated of March 27^th in 196 BC. At the top, the decree is written in hieroglyphs, which was the traditional script on Egyptian monuments. In the middle, the text is written in Demotic (the everyday script of literate Egyptians). And finally, the botton is written in Greek, the language used by the government. The stone was placed in a temple, probably at the city of Sais, near Rachid.

It have been discovered in mid July 1799 by soldiers in Napoleon's invading army, at the town of Rashid. The scholars immediately realised that it might help to decipher hieroglyphs, since the Greek inscription which could be read. In England and in France, two men worked on the decoding : Thomas Young (1773-1829) and Jean-François Champollion (1790-1732). Young used the cartouches on the Rosetta Stone to find the name of the Greek royal name Ptolemy, but he thought most hieroglyphs were symbolic images.

On September 14^th in 1822, Champollion realised that he could read the name of earlier native Egyptians pharaohs, and that hieroglyphs were signs that must write the ancient Egyptian language. With his knowledge of Coptic language, he could start to read hieroglyphic texts.