The Discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the British Understanding of Ancient Egypt

The Rosetta Stone is, by some distance, the most famous object in the British Museum. It is also one of the most contested. The 1799 French discovery of the stone, its 1801 transfer to British hands as a condition of the French surrender of Egypt, and the 1822 decipherment of its hieroglyphic text by Jean-François Champollion produced the field of Egyptology, transformed Western understanding of ancient Egypt, and gave rise to a controversy over the ownership of cultural property that has not been settled. The stone’s modern status — the most-photographed object in the British Museum, the centre of the most prominent case for the repatriation of cultural property — is itself a product of imperial history, of the Napoleonic Wars, and of the British Museum’s nineteenth-century position as the principal repository of Egyptian antiquities in the world.

Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign

Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801 was a major military and scientific undertaking. The French invasion of Egypt in July 1798 was intended to threaten British commerce in the East and to provide a base from which to attack the British in India. The French invasion force of about 35,000 men easily defeated the Mamluk forces that controlled Egypt, and Napoleon entered Cairo in July 1798. The French position was precarious from the start: the Royal Navy under Admiral Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile on 1 August 1798, cutting off the expedition from France, and a Turkish army invaded Egypt in 1799.

The campaign included a substantial scientific component. Napoleon took with him some 160 savants — mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and antiquaries — who established the Institut d’Égypte in Cairo and began the systematic study of the Egyptian monuments. The monumental Description de l’Égypte, published in 23 volumes between 1809 and 1828, was the principal product of this work. Vivant Denon, the artist who accompanied the expedition, produced a series of drawings of Egyptian monuments that were published in 1802 and that shaped European understanding of pharaonic architecture for a generation. The French expedition’s significance for the history of Egyptology is therefore twofold: it was the trigger for the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and it produced the first systematic European study of the Egyptian monuments.

The Discovery of the Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone was discovered in July 1799 by French soldiers working on the construction of a fort near the town of Rosetta (Rashid) in the Nile Delta. The stone, a slab of black basalt measuring 114 cm tall by 72 cm wide, bore a bilingual inscription in Greek and Egyptian, the latter written in both demotic and hieroglyphic scripts. The Greek text, which could be read, showed that the inscription was a decree issued by a synod of priests in 196 BC in honour of the boy-king Ptolemy V. The Egyptian texts, in demotic and hieroglyphic, were at the time completely unreadable.

The stone’s significance was immediately recognised. The French authorities had it cleaned and copied, and copies were circulated to European scholars. When the French surrendered Egypt to the British in 1801 under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria, the stone was claimed by the British as a condition of the surrender. It was transported to Portsmouth aboard HMS Egyptienne in February 1802 and has been on display at the British Museum since 1802, with the exception of the two world wars, when it was evacuated for safekeeping.

The Decipherment of Hieroglyphics

The decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics was the work of Jean-François Champollion, a French scholar, with important contributions from the British scholars Thomas Young and William Bankes. Young, a polymath, made important early progress in identifying the hieroglyphic signs that corresponded to the sounds of the royal names, and his Egypt article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1819 was the first major British contribution to the decipherment. His article appeared in the supplementary volumes published in 1819, and was the first systematic account of the decipherment problem in English.

Champollion’s breakthrough came in September 1822, when he realised that the hieroglyphic system was both phonetic and ideographic, and that the cartouches enclosing the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra could be read phonetically. He announced his discovery in a famous letter to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris on 27 September 1822 — “Je tiens l’affaire!” (“I have got it!”). He published his results in the Lettre à M. Dacier of 1822 and the Précis du système hiéroglyphique of 1824. Champollion’s decipherment opened the field of Egyptology, and within a generation the previously mysterious hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt could be read.

British Egyptology in the 19th Century

British Egyptology developed rapidly in the nineteenth century, with major figures and institutions. Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), who lived in Egypt for many years and published the first comprehensive English-language account of the Egyptian monuments, was the principal early British Egyptologist. His Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837) was the standard work for a generation. The Egypt Exploration Fund, founded in 1882 by Amelia Edwards and Reginald Stuart Poole, was the principal British institution for archaeological research in Egypt, and it sponsored a long series of important excavations at sites including Deir el-Bahari, Tell el-Amarna, and Abydos.

The British Museum’s Egyptian collection, founded on the acquisition of the Rosetta Stone, was enormously expanded by the work of Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, who acquired large numbers of papyri, statues, and other objects for the museum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The British School of Archaeology in Egypt, founded in 1905, became the principal British institution for archaeological training and research in Egypt. The British Museum’s collection of Egyptian antiquities is now one of the largest in the world outside of Egypt, with more than 100,000 objects.

Howard Carter and the Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb

The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922 was the most famous archaeological discovery of the twentieth century. Carter, working for Lord Carnarvon, had been searching the Valley of the Kings for several years when, on 4 November 1922, he found the steps leading to the sealed tomb. His telegram to Carnarvon — “At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations” — became one of the most famous archaeological telegrams ever sent. The tomb proved to be largely intact, containing the mummified body of the boy-king, his golden death mask, and an astonishing collection of funerary goods.

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb produced a worldwide sensation and gave a major boost to the study of ancient Egypt. The treasures from the tomb, which took nearly a decade to clear, record, and conserve, are now the centrepiece of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, with some items on tour. The discovery also marked a pivotal moment in the popular understanding of ancient Egypt, and the Tutankhamun exhibitions of the 1960s and 1970s drew enormous crowds around the world. The so-called “curse of the pharaohs” — Lord Carnarvon’s death in April 1923, soon after the tomb was opened, was the most prominent piece of evidence — became a permanent feature of popular Egyptology.

The Modern Controversy

The Rosetta Stone has been the subject of a renewed debate in recent years, with some scholars and commentators calling for its return to Egypt. The Egyptian government has periodically requested its repatriation — most recently in a 2003 petition to the British Museum — and the question of the stone’s return is closely linked to the broader debate over the legacy of European imperialism and the future of major museum collections. The British Museum’s position is that the stone is part of the global heritage of human knowledge and that its return would set a precedent that would weaken the world’s great museums. The 2002 British Museum Act permits the return of objects only in narrowly defined circumstances, and the trustees have consistently refused to return the stone.

The stone’s place in the popular understanding of ancient Egypt is unrivalled. The most-photographed object in the British Museum, it has been the subject of books, films, and documentaries, and it appears in school textbooks around the world. The success of the decipherment, which opened up the whole of ancient Egypt to modern understanding, is a rare example of a scientific breakthrough that has entered the general culture. The Rosetta Stone is, in this respect, a permanent symbol of the human capacity to recover lost knowledge — and of the contested relationship between imperial acquisition and modern scholarship.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the decipherment has been the subject of considerable recent revision. The older tradition, going back to Champollion’s own account, treated the French scholar as the sole discoverer of the hieroglyphic system. The work of the English scholar Thomas Young was, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, treated as a preliminary to Champollion’s work — important, but not central. Andrew Robinson’s Cracking the Egyptian Code (2012) and the work of the French scholar Marc Étienne have rebalanced this picture: Young’s contributions, including the identification of the phonetic values of several hieroglyphs and the recognition that the demotic script was derived from hieroglyphic, were more substantial than the older tradition allowed. The race for priority between Champollion and Young was, in any case, a contest within a single scientific community whose members were mostly working with the same methods and the same data. The current generation of Egyptological historians, including Toby Wilkinson, John Ray, and Salima Ikram, has been more interested in the colonial context of the decipherment — in the role of the British and French empires in producing the conditions for the decipherment — than in the priority dispute.

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