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27 September 1822Reputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Champollion reads hieroglyphs again after 1,400 silent years

On the timeline · around 27 September 1822 · Rediscovering EgyptRediscovering EgyptChampollion reads hieroglyphs again after 1,400 silent years750 CE1000125015001750

What happened

French soldiers accidentally unearthed a broken slab of black granodiorite near Rosetta while digging fort foundations on 15 July 1799, and officer Pierre-François Bouchard recognized its importance immediately. The stone carried a single priestly decree inscribed three times over, in hieroglyphic script, in the everyday Demotic Egyptian script, and in Ancient Greek, the last one still readable to any classically trained scholar. When Napoleon's forces surrendered, the stone passed to Britain under the 1801 Treaty of Alexandria and has stood on public display at the British Museum ever since. English physicist Thomas Young made the first crack, showing that some hieroglyphic signs spelled out the sounds of a royal name, Ptolemy. Building on that, French scholar Jean-François Champollion, who also knew Coptic, the last living descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, realized hieroglyphic signs recorded actual sounds throughout the script, not just in foreign royal names, and announced the full decipherment to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris on 27 September 1822, with Young himself in the audience.

Why it matters

Hieroglyphic writing had gone unread by anyone alive since the fourth century CE. Every specific date, name, and quoted inscription earlier in this very timeline, Narmer's palette, Ramesses's treaty, Akhenaten's temple walls, Hatshepsut's erased inscriptions, is legible today because Champollion's breakthrough reopened a script that had been genuinely, completely silent for roughly 1,400 years.

How we know

The Rosetta Stone survives intact in the British Museum's collection, and Champollion's own 1822 paper, along with his correspondence and annotated copies, documents his reasoning step by step: from Young's royal cartouches to the recognition that ordinary Egyptian names used the same phonetic signs, cross-checked against his independent knowledge of spoken Coptic.

Sources

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Part of a timelineAncient Egypt26 events · Three thousand years of pharaohs, from the first unification of the Nile valley to Cleopatra's death, and the two nineteenth and twentieth-century discoveries that let the modern world read and see it all again.View all →