1799 — The Rosetta Stone

Likely on July 15, 1799, Napoleon's army was rebuilding a crumbling Egyptian fort when a soldier spotted something extraordinary in the rubble: a black granite slab covered in three scripts, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and ancient Greek. It was the Rosetta Stone, the key to Egypt's lost language.

Because the same royal decree was carved in all three scripts, scholars could finally compare them side by side. Still, the work took time: twenty-three years passed before French scholar Jean-François Champollion cracked the code in 1822. With his long-awaited breakthrough, three thousand years of Egyptian history suddenly spoke again to the world.