Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
Jan
06
Jul
15
Although there is some debate about the exact date, on what was likely July 15, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles east of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.
In a This Day in History video, learn that on July 19, 1799, the Rosetta Stone unlocked the language of the pharaohs. For 14,000 years, no one had been able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs until Napoleon’s army stumbled upon a clue: a 4×2 tablet with three languages inscribed on it. One of the languages on the tablet was Greek and it revealed that all three of the languages contained the same message; therefore, it unlocked the secret language.
Dec
14
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