Brilliant!

Jean-Francois Champollion was a persistent and imaginative man. When he saw the Rosetta Stone he pieced together an ancient mystery that had eluded scholars for the past nineteen hundred years. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 by a group of Napoleon’s soldiers near the town of Rosetta (not far from Alexandria). The broken stone was dubbed The Rosetta Stone and became the key to unlocking the ancient Egyptian language. The stone is divided into three distinct sections with three distinct inscriptions. All three inscriptions have the same message but all three are in a different language. The top section is written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle is written in a script called Coptic Greek (or demotic script), and the lower portion is written in ancient Greek. Jean-Francois Champollion translated from the Greek to the Coptic and then to the Egyptian. A brilliant deduction that has earned Jean-Francois Champollion a place in the history of history.

This Fun Fact was taken from Secrets of the Great Pyramid by Peter Tompkins.