The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele discovered in 1799 by French soldiers during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. It proved to be the key to unlocking the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had been unreadable for over a thousand years. The stone features a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. Crucially, the decree is inscribed in three scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (used for religious documents), Egyptian Demotic (used for daily administration), and Ancient Greek (the language of the administration). By comparing the Greek text, which scholars could already read, with the hieroglyphs, Jean-François Champollion was able to decipher the phonetic nature of the Egyptian script in 1822. This breakthrough allowed historians to read thousands of years of Egyptian history, literature, and religious texts directly for the first time.