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How the Rosetta Stone cracked hieroglyphs

8 October 2026

The Rosetta Stone carries one decree three times: in hieroglyphs, in demotic and in Greek. Scholars could read the Greek, so they knew what the Egyptian parts said. The way in was the ovals called cartouches. The Greek named King Ptolemy, so the signs inside the ring had to spell Ptolemaios.

The stone did not do the work alone. Jean-François Champollion announced the key in 1822, after testing the Ptolemy cartouche against a Cleopatra on another monument and then against the names of Egyptian kings. He showed that hieroglyphs write sounds as well as ideas, and reading Egyptian became possible again.

A script nobody could read

The last dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved at Philae in AD 394. After that the knowledge died out, and for some fourteen centuries the signs were treated as riddles. A late Greek book, the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, explained them as pure symbols, and in the seventeenth century Athanasius Kircher published long mystical 'translations' that later proved wrong.

The stone turned up in 1799, when French soldiers found it at Rashid, the town Europeans called Rosetta. It passed to Britain in 1801 and has been in the British Museum since 1802. The text is a decree passed by priests at Memphis in 196 BC to honour the young Ptolemy V. Only 14 broken lines of the hieroglyphic part survive, against 32 of demotic and 54 of Greek.

Cartouche

Ptolemy, sign by sign

Thomas Young, an English physician and physicist, had already argued by 1819, in an article on Egypt for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that the cartouches held the king's name and that some of their signs stood for sounds. Several of the sound values he proposed were right, others partly right or wrong. Read with today's values, the cartouche runs:

stool: p, the first sound
bread loaf: t
quail chick: w, here the o
recumbent lion: l, a sign for foreign names
owl: m, as in English
two flowering reeds: i, for the ai of Ptolemaios
door bolt: s

Stool Bread loaf Quail chick Recumbent lion Owl Flowering reed Door bolt

Cleopatra, the test

A guess built on one name proves little. The check came from an obelisk taken from Philae to England. The Greek on its base names King Ptolemy VIII and queens called Cleopatra, and a lithograph of its hieroglyphs showed two cartouches, one of them the familiar Ptolemy.

If the other said Kleopatra, the signs had to fall in the right places. They did. The stool (p) stood fifth, the lion (l) second, the quail chick (o) fourth, and the flowering reed held the e. The name opens with the sandy hill (q, a deep k), and closes with the bread loaf and the egg, the feminine ending and the silent sign for goddesses and queens.

One sign broke the pattern in a useful way. Where Ptolemy has the bread loaf for t, Cleopatra has the hand. Champollion took this as two signs for one sound; Egyptologists now give the hand the value d, the nearest Egyptian match for the Greek t.

Sandy hill Recumbent lion Flowering reed Quail chick Stool Egyptian vulture Hand Mouth Bread loaf Egg

The step past the Greek names

Young believed the sound signs were a trick reserved for foreign names. Champollion's breakthrough was to show they ran through native Egyptian writing too.

In September 1822, by the usual account, he studied drawings of reliefs that the architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot had made in Egypt, some at Abu Simbel. Some historians doubt that the insight came as suddenly as the story tells. One cartouche began with the sun disc and ended with the three fox skins and the folded cloth. He knew Coptic, the last stage of Egyptian, written in Greek letters, and in Coptic mise means 'to give birth'. Sun (Ra) plus ms plus s gave Ramesses. The ibis of the god Thoth with the same ending gave Thutmose.

That was the real key: one word written with a picture of a god, a sign for two sounds and a sign for one. On 27 September 1822 he presented his Lettre à M. Dacier to the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris, and in 1824 his Précis laid out the whole system.

Sun Three fox skins Folded cloth Ibis on a standard

Who deserves the credit

Young and Champollion's admirers argued for decades, and historians still weigh the shares. Young saw early that demotic and hieroglyphs were related and that cartouches spelled names. Champollion turned scattered guesses into a working grammar of the script.

Others helped. William Bankes, who had the Philae obelisk brought to England, had already noted in the margin of his lithographs that one of its cartouches might read Cleopatra.

Read the cartouches yourself

Both names are on the site sign by sign. Ptolemy V's page shows his cartouche with a button to draw it yourself, one sign at a time. In Room 4 of the British Museum, photograph the stone's top lines and the camera boxes the signs it finds and names them.

Read Ptolemy's cartouche

Questions

What languages are on the Rosetta Stone?

Two languages in three scripts. The Egyptian text is written twice, in hieroglyphs and in demotic, the everyday script of the time; the third version is in Greek.

What does the Rosetta Stone say?

It praises Ptolemy V for his gifts to the temples and orders statues and festivals in his honour. Copies were to stand in temples across Egypt.

Can people read the Rosetta Stone today?

Yes. Egyptologists read all three versions, and translations of each are published.

Does Egypt want the Rosetta Stone back?

Egyptian officials and scholars have asked for its return more than once. The British Museum holds it, and the debate continues.

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