Page "Rosetta Stone" Paragraph 21

On Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt, the expeditionary army was accompanied by the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a corps of 167 technical experts ( savants ).

On 1799, as French soldiers under the command of Colonel d ' Hautpoul were strengthening the defences of Fort Julien, a couple of miles north-east of the Egyptian port city of Rashid, Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard spotted a slab with inscriptions on one side that the soldiers had uncovered.

He and d ' Hautpoul saw at once that it might be important and informed general Jacques-François Menou, who happened to be at Rosetta.

The find was announced to Napoleon's newly founded scientific association in Cairo, the Institut d ' Égypte, in a report by Commission member Michel Ange Lancret noting that it contained three inscriptions, the first in hieroglyphs and the third in Greek, and rightly suggesting that the three inscriptions would be versions of the same text.

Lancret's report, dated 1799, was read to a meeting of the Institute soon after.

Bouchard, meanwhile, transported the stone to Cairo for examination by scholars.

Napoleon himself inspected what had already begun to be called la Pierre de Rosette, the Rosetta Stone, shortly before his return to France in August 1799.