Who discovered the Rosetta Stone?

The stone was discovered in July 1799, one year after the French had arrived in Egypt. Captain François-Xavier Bouchard, an engineer and officer in Napoleon’s Egyptian army, was in charge of the demolition of an ancient wall in the city of Rosetta on a branch of the Nile, a few miles from the sea. The Rosetta Stone was built into the wall, but Bouchard recognized that the stone might make it possible to decipher hieroglyphics. So he saved it, and the stone was taken to the scientists in Cairo in mid-August 1799. The Rosetta Stone is one of the most important objects in the British Museum as it holds the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs—a script made up of small pictures that was used originally in ancient Egypt for religious texts. Hieroglyphic writing died out in Egypt in the fourth century C.E.