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 de...

The Greek band of text was, happily, almost complete, and could be read and understood. As far as the hieroglyphic and demotic bands were concerned, scholars were faced with many questions. Were the two Egyptian versions essentially the same? Did they offer complete translations of the Greek? Was...

The Rosetta Stone, first published in French in 1999, the bicentenary of the monument's discovery, is very generously written. Robert Sole, a well-known journalist, and Dominique Valbelle, a distinguished Egyptologist, present the history of the discovery and the scholarly attempts to fathom the ...

It also fairly presents the findings of Thomas Young, the British scientist and polymath who alone among competitors was acknowledged by Champollion to have made significant discoveries. The crown, however, must go to Champollion, who had the philological ability as well as the cryptological tale...