In 1799, French soldiers in Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta Stone in the town of Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt. The stone is a granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued in 196 BC. Its immense literary and historical value lies in the fact that the same message is written in three different scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. This 'translation key' allowed scholars, most notably Jean-François Champollion, to finally decipher hieroglyphs, which had been a mystery for over 1,400 years. The stone provided the breakthrough needed to read thousands of years of Egyptian history, literature, and religious texts. Since 1802, it has been housed in the British Museum and remains one of the most visited objects in its collection, as well as a metaphor for any vital key to understanding difficult information.