During one of the French soldiers occupations of Egypt in July 15 1799, they discovered a stone with three different columns of writing. Each column of the Rosetta Stone was written in different languages, Hieroglyphics, Egyptian Demotic, and Greek. The stone had puzzled scholars for centuries. It was the key to deciphering hieroglyphics, few people know the translation. The Rosetta stone had been a part of a wall inside an ottoman fortress, and was written in 197 BC
Months after its discovery, it was presented for inspection for no other than Napoleon. When the British defeated Napoleons forces in Alexandriain 1801, they seized many of the Egyptian artifacts the french had discovered during their occupation in Egypt, including the Rosetta stone. The British put the valuable stone in the British museum in 1802, and it has been there ever since.It didn’t take scholars long to translate the 52 lines of Greek and the 32 lines of Demotic. Though it did take them more than two decades to translate the Hieroglyphics. Part of the problem was prevailing an idea that Hieroglyphics was a symbolic writing system, but it was actually a largely phonetic one. By 1822 the Rosetta stone was fully translated.