Dr. Ilona Regulski

And so when the stone was found, they called it the Pierre de Rosette.

So it became Rosetta Stone in English.

It's present day Rashid.

It's a very vibrant city with a diverse heritage.

And we also like to show that in the exhibition.

It's not just the place where the Rosetta Stone comes from.

It's also a city in its own right where people are living, communicating and have ideas about their heritage and have ideas about what they would like the world to know about their city.

Yes, so Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798.

This story is very well known, of course.

And during the works of the fortifications along the north coast of Egypt at Rashid, they discovered the Rosetta Stone in the foundations of the building.

So it was reused as a building block because it's a strong foundation.

compact stone, so it was probably useful.

And it was immediately realized that the stone could be important for the decipherment.

In fact, it was immediately in the newspapers in Egypt that potentially they had discovered the key to decipherment, which is quite amazing if you think about

The kind of context, we're in a political context that there's soldiers restoring the fort and they immediately realized how important this could potentially be for our understanding of human history, which is quite an amazing idea that so soon it was an important object.

And because of the three scripts and Greek that was known at the time, so they immediately realized that perhaps the Greek text could help us to understand the two Egyptian languages.

Yes, there have been attempts, of course, since Greco-Roman times, very soon after hieroglyphs fell out of use.

It's a script that is very pictorial.

It's beautiful.

It's intriguing.