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The inscription on the Roseta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests, one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. The decree is inscribed on the Roseta stone three times, in hieroglyphic, demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration). The importance of this to Egyptology is very important. Soon after the end of the 4 century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Roseta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.

Soldiers in Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799 while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta).

The Roseta Stone has been on display in a British Museum since 1802.Towards the end of the First World War, in 1917, when the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London, they moved it to safety along with other, portable, ‘important’ objects. The Roseta Stone spent the next two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway fifty feet below the ground at Holborn.

The Roseta Stone is one hundred and fourteen point four cm high, and about seventy two cm wide.