: A French scholar who made the ultimate breakthrough in 1822 . Using his knowledge of Coptic (a later form of the Egyptian language), he proved that hieroglyphs represented actual sounds and phonetic elements, not just symbolic pictures. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone
After the French were defeated by the British in 1801, the stone was seized as a prize of war and transported to the in London, where it has remained since 1802. A high-stakes intellectual race began between two rivals:
In , during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, French soldiers were digging foundations to shore up the fort’s defenses. Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard spotted the dark granodiorite slab built into an old wall and immediately realized its potential importance. Because scholars already knew how to read Ancient Greek, they hoped this stone would finally provide the "key" to translating the mysterious hieroglyphs, which had been unreadable for nearly 1,400 years. The Great Decipherment Race