July 15, 1799: The Rosetta Stone is discovered.

The discoverer was a young French officer, a member of Napoleon’s expeditionary army named Pierre-François Bouchard, who had been working on an engineering project near port city of Rashid (or Rosette, as it came to be known by the French). Realizing the significance of the discovery, Bouchard and his commanding officer passed the artifact along to higher-ups. Their instincts paid off: the stone was inscribed with one message, but in three different scripts - hieroglyphics, demotic, and Greek (all of which were used in Ptolemaic Egypt).

The stone was an invaluable stepping-stone for scholars; for centuries, they had been befuddled by the seemingly indecipherable hieroglyphic script, the use of which had effectively ended by the fifth century AD. The Greek text was translated within five years of the stone’s discovery, but the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were not fully deciphered until 1822 (achieved largely through the work of two scholars, one French and one English - Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young). The publication of Description de l’Égypte, a collaborative effort of the savants who accompanied Napoleon’s expedition, along with the discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone, renewed European interest in Egypt and gave rise to the modern field of Egyptology. Possession of the stone was turned over the the British soon after its discovery, and it has remained on public display at the British Museum since 1802.