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A slab of dark granodiorite , broken at the top , stands behind glass in the British Museum in London . French soldiers found it in 1799 , and for more than twenty years it defeated every scholar . The stone was carved in 196 BC by Egyptian priests . It carries a single decree in three scripts . Hieroglyphs are at the top , Demotic is in the middle and Greek is at the bottom . Scholars could read the Greek with ease , but the hieroglyphs remained silent . Jean - François Champollion was a French linguist who had studied ancient languages since childhood . On 27 September 1822 , he announced his decipherment to the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris . His breakthrough built on earlier work . The English scientist Thomas Young had already studied one oval frame of signs , called a cartouche . He linked it to the Greek name " Ptolemy " . Ptolemy was the king the decree honoured . Young believed , however , that only foreign names were spelled with sounds . Champollion proved him wrong . In September 1822 he read the names of the pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose on copies of temple inscriptions . These were Egyptian names , and their signs also stood for sounds . Hieroglyphs mixed signs for sounds with signs for ideas . The method held across the whole script . Champollion could now assign sound values to signs far beyond the stone itself . Tomb inscriptions , medical texts and love poems became readable again . Three thousand years of Egyptian writing could speak for the first time in centuries .
