Most of what we know now about the ancient Egyptians, we owe to Napoleon. When leading his army into Egypt, aware of the thousands-years old civilizations that lived on the Nile delta, he gave specific instructions to his troops to look out for any ancient artifacts, and preserve any found. Captain Pierre Bouchard remembered those orders when he found a slab of a stone inscribed with some strange symbols on it. Bouchard was himself convinced, and his enthusiasm was shared by Napoleon, that they had made a monumental discovery.

On this day, July 19, in 1799, the Rosetta Stone, named for the town 35 miles south of Alexandria where it was found, was taken for safe keeping by Bouchard. He never got a chance to bring it back to Napoleon, as the French armies were defeated in Egypt, and the stone became a British possession.

Britain’s Thomas Young took the first extensive study of the Rosetta stone. The inscriptions were in Greek and Roman, which repeated the same message message, as well as an unknown Egyptian hieroglyphic language. The actual translation of the hieroglyphics was done by French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion.