English label tells us that these three inscriptions are renderings of
the same message, and that this message is a "decree of the priests
of Memphis conferring divine honors on Ptolemy V. (Epiphenes), King of
Egypt, B.C. 195." The label goes on to state that the upper inscription
(of which, unfortunately, only part of the last dozen lines or so
remains, the slab being broken) is in "the Egyptian language, in
hieroglyphics, or writing of the priests"; the second inscription "in
the same language is in Demotic, or the writing of the people"; and
the third "the Greek language and character." Following this is a brief
biography of the Rosetta Stone itself, as follows: "The stone was found
by the French in 1798 among the ruins of Fort Saint Julien, near the
Rosetta mouth of the Nile. It passed into the hands of the British by
the treaty of Alexandria, and was deposited in the British Museum in
the year 1801." There is a whole volume of history in that brief
inscription--and a bitter sting thrown in, if the reader chance to be
a Frenchman. Yet the facts involved could scarcely be suggested more
modestly. They are recorded much more bluntly in a graven inscription
on the side of the stone, which reads: "Captured in Egypt by the British
Army, 1801." No Frenchman could read those words without a veritable
sinking of the heart.

The value of the Rosetta Stone depended on the fact that it gave
promise, even when casually inspected, of furnishing a key to the
centuries-old mystery of the hieroglyphics. For two thousand years the
secret of these strange markings had been forgotten. Nowhere in the
world--quite as little in Egypt as elsewhere--had any man the slightest
clew to their meaning; there were those who even doubted whether these
droll picturings really had any specific meaning, questioning whether
they were not rather vague symbols of esoteric religious import and
nothing more. And it was the Rosetta Stone that gave the answer to
these doubters and restored to the world a lost language and a forgotten
literature.

The trustees of the museum recognized at once that the problem of the
Rosetta Stone was one on which the scientists of the world might well
exhaust their ingenuity, and promptly published to the world a carefully
lithographed copy of the entire inscription, so that foreign scholarship
had equal opportunity with the British to try at the riddle. It was an
Englishman, however, who first gained a clew to the soluti