The Rosetta Stone is one of the most important artifacts in literary history because it provided the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Discovered in 1799 by French soldiers during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, the stone is a granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC. The decree appears in three scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (the script of the gods), Egyptian Demotic (the script of the people), and Ancient Greek (the language of the administration). Because Greek was well-known to scholars, it allowed Jean-François Champollion to spend years comparing the texts until he successfully 'cracked the code' in 1822. This breakthrough opened up thousands of years of Egyptian history, literature, and religion that had been silent for centuries. The stone has been housed in the British Museum since 1802 and remains its most-visited object, symbolizing the intersection of archaeology, linguistics, and art.