The Rosetta Stone is an Ancient Egyptian artifact which was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of hieroglyphic writing. The stone is a Ptolemaic era stele with carved text. The text is made up of 3 translations of a single passage, written in two Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and demotic), and in classical Greek. It was created in 196 BC, discovered by the French in 1799 at Rosetta, a harbour on the Mediterranean coast in Egypt, and contributed greatly to the decipherment of the principles of hieroglyphic writing in 1822 by Frenchman and French scholar Jean-François Champollion. Comparative translation of the stone assisted in understanding many previously undecipherable examples of hieroglyphic writing.
The term Rosetta Stone has become idiomatic as something that is a critical key to a process of decryption or translation of a difficult problem.
