The Day the Rosetta Stone Was Turned Over (1799, Egypt)
Coming to Wonder History on 3 December 2026.
In July 1799 a demolition party rebuilding the crumbling Fort Julien at the mouth of the Nile levers a black granite slab out of a collapsed Mamluk wall and turns it face-up to find three bands of writing. From that sandspit the stone travels: down a mud slipway at Rashid, through a night squall on a Delta river boat, up the sheer-legs at Bulaq into the courtyard of Napoleon's Institut d'Égypte in Cairo, where a printer smears it with ink and pulls the first copies the world will ever see. Two years later the French hide it in a general's baggage in Alexandria, lose it at crowbar-point to British redcoats, and watch it dragged through the surf below the Pharos fort onto a lighter. It is hauled up the water-gate steps of Somerset House in London, cast in plaster, and the casts scatter across Europe — until, in a garret above the Paris rooftops in September 1822, Jean-François Champollion matches a cartouche to a king's name, bolts down five flights with his portfolio, and runs across the Pont des Arts to the Institut de France, shedding pages, to say that the hieroglyphs can be read.
About this story
- Category
- Dramatic Turning Points
- Length
- 10 illustrated pages
Who appears
- Pierre-François Bouchard — French lieutenant of engineers who finds the stone
- Hamid al-Rashidi — Egyptian foreman of the labour gang at Rashid
- Jean-Joseph Marcel — Printer of the Institut d'Égypte who takes the first copies
- Captain Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner — British officer who seizes the stone and ships it to London
- Jean-François Champollion — Scholar who deciphers the hieroglyphs in Paris, 1822
What happens on 3 December 2026
This story is finished and scheduled. On 3 December 2026 it opens here in full — every page illustrated, with narration you can listen to — as part of Wonder History. Nothing on this page is a placeholder: the story exists, it has been reviewed, and this is its address.
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