The British Museum's most visited object is a piece of bureaucracy: the Rosetta Stone bears a priestly decree honouring Ptolemy V, repeated in three scripts, and has been on display almost continuously since 1802.

196 BC · 1802 · apart: 1998 years

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The event

• The Memphis decree of the Rosetta Stone196 BC · Memphis, Egypt. A synod of Egyptian priests at Memphis issued a decree honouring the young king Ptolemy V in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. One copy, carved on a stele, was found by French soldiers near Rosetta in 1799. By comparing the texts, Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.

2nd century BC · 19th century

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