In Our Time (radio series)

The Rosetta Stone, first broadcast February 11, 2021 The story behind one of the most famous museum objects in the world: a damaged, dark granite block from around 196 BC carrying the same text in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Penelope Wilson, Campbell Price and Richard Bruce Parkinson cover its discovery by Napoleon's soldiers at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast and the roughly 20 years before Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs, the first person to understand them since they fell out of use some 1,500 years earlier. Clear enough for a complete beginner, and it explains why the stone matters for the whole written culture of ancient Egypt it opened up.