Rashid: The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone contains an inscription written in three scripts (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek) and allowed the decipherment of hieroglyphs and Demotic. It was found by Napoleon's army in 1799 in the city of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta, but the inscription itself is from Memphis (ca. 120 miles southeast, at the southern tip of the Nile delta) and dates to 196 BCE. At the time of its discovery the ancient Egyptian languages were indecipherable, but Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion were able to make connections between them and the Greek text (which could be translated) after assuming that the cartouches in the Hieroglyphic text preserved the proper names seen in the Greek inscription (Ptolemy and Cleopatra).