The nearly one-ton stela, experts determined, had come from a temple dedicated to the Greek-Egyptian King Ptolemy V in 196 B.C. Pierre-François Bouchard, the officer in charge, sensed its significance and turned it over to scholars for analysis. Amid a pile of rubble being used for a renovation project, he noticed a 4-foot-by-3-foot granite slab, covered on one side with intricate inscriptions. On a steamy day in July 1799, a member of a French military work detail at a tumbledown fort in the Nile Delta made an unusual discovery.
THE WRITING OF THE GODS The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone By Edward Dolnick
