All three were dead languages, but the Greek alphabet was still in use.
And the three bands of text - classical Greek, hieroglyphs and an Egyptian shorthand called Demotic - were intended to proclaim the monarch’s achievements in multiple tongues to the peoples of the empire. The nearly one-ton stela, experts determined, had come from a temple dedicated to the Greek-Egyptian King Ptolemy V in 196 B.C. Pierre-François Bouchard, the officer in charge, sensed its significance and turned it over to scholars for analysis. Amid a pile of rubble being used for a renovation project, he noticed a 4-foot-by-3-foot granite slab, covered on one side with intricate inscriptions. On a steamy day in July 1799, a member of a French military work detail at a tumbledown fort in the Nile Delta made an unusual discovery. THE WRITING OF THE GODS The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone By Edward Dolnick
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