Page "Rosetta Stone" Paragraph 22

The discovery was reported in Courrier de l ' Égypte, the official newspaper of the French expedition, in September: the anonymous reporter expressed a hope that the stone might one day be the key to deciphering hieroglyphs.

In 1800, three of the Commission's technical experts devised ways to make copies of the texts on the stone.

One of these, the printer and gifted linguist Jean-Joseph Marcel, is credited as the first to recognise that the middle text, originally guessed to be Syriac, was, in fact, written in the Egyptian demotic script, rarely used for stone inscriptions and, therefore, seldom seen by scholars at that time.

It was the artist and inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté who found a way to use the stone itself as a printing block ; a slightly different method for reproducing the inscriptions was adopted by Antoine Galland.

The prints that resulted were taken to Paris by General Charles Dugua.

Scholars in Europe were now able to see the inscriptions and attempt to read them.