Tap a sentence to see it in Spanish, and tap the book to study it. The speaker plays one sentence, the round button plays a paragraph, and the player at the bottom reads the whole story. Press T to show or hide every translation.
A flat slab of dark stone sits in the British Museum . It has writing on it in three different scripts . French soldiers found it in Egypt in 1799 . The stone is called the Rosetta Stone . The same message is written three times on it . Scholars could read Greek . The second script is Demotic . The third is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs . No one could read the hieroglyphs . The first clue came from an English scientist , Thomas Young . The Greek text has a king 's name : Ptolemy . In the hieroglyphs , one group of signs sits inside an oval frame . The frame is called a cartouche . Young saw that this group was the name Ptolemy . Jean - François Champollion was a young French scholar . He studied copies of the stone and many other old texts . He read more names in cartouches . Then he read ordinary Egyptian words too . Hieroglyphs were not just pictures . Many signs also stood for sounds . On 27 September 1822 , Champollion announced his answer in Paris . Three thousand years of Egyptian writing became open to the world .
