Napoleon and the Stone

The stone was passed from Rosetta to the institute set up by Napoleon in Cairo. The French may have lost the stone physically when it was "captured" by the British army, but they can rightly claim a vicarious ownership of the texts, carved on it in 196BC after a convocation of priests issued a decree in honour of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, which was to be inscribed in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek on hard stone monuments set up in temples throughout Egypt. The struggle to elucidate the two Egyptian scripts was centred in France, and it was Champollion who finally made the breakthrough.