The ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs (a form of pictorial letters) for writing. It is a lost language but the discovery of 
the Rosetta allowed it to be deciphered. The stone was unearthed by a soldier of Napoleon's Army in 1779 at Rosetta, 
Alexandria during the construction of a fortress. It is made of basalt stone and measured 125 X 80cm and contains three 
languages hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek. There was a race to be the first to decipher the writings including the British 
ophthalmologist Thomas Young. The race was won by Jean-Francois Champollion who could read both Greek and Coptic 
(which came from demotic). He was able to work out the meaning of each hieroglyph by assuming that the stone contains 
the same messages in three different languages. The stone is preserved in the British Museum.