Famous Speeches

Imagine being a cool, dark grey stone, your face covered with three kinds of beautiful, tiny carvings. For a very long time, I lay hidden, holding a secret that no one in the world could figure out. One part of me has pictures of birds, reeds, and lions. Another part has flowing, curvy lines that look like a doctor's hurried writing. And the third part has letters that might look a little familiar to you, like letters from the Greek alphabet. I am not just any rock. I am a key, a translator, and a voice from a lost world that had been silent for thousands of years. Can you guess what I am. I am the Rosetta Stone, and I have a story to tell about a message that changed everything we know about the past. My journey was long, and for a while, it seemed like my purpose was completely forgotten, but a little bit of luck and a lot of curiosity brought my secrets back into the light for everyone to share.

My story begins in a very different time, in ancient Egypt, a land of giant pyramids and powerful pharaohs, in the year 196 BCE. I wasn't made to be a tricky puzzle. I was carefully carved by a group of priests to share a special message celebrating their young king, a boy named Ptolemy V. They wanted to make sure that absolutely everyone in the kingdom could read about the king's good deeds and understand why he was a great ruler. So, they carved the exact same message on my face three different times, in three different scripts. The first was the amazing picture-writing called hieroglyphs, which was the sacred language used for important religious texts. The second was a swirly script called Demotic, which was the common language used for everyday government business. And the third was in Greek, because at that time, the rulers of Egypt, like King Ptolemy, came from Greece and spoke Greek. I was then placed inside a temple, standing tall so that everyone who visited could see the message and honor their king.

But as centuries passed, things changed. The old temples of Egypt crumbled, new languages were spoken, and sadly, the meaning of my beautiful hieroglyphs was completely forgotten. No one knew how to read the pictures anymore. I became just another broken rock, buried under sand and dirt, and my important message fell silent. It's a little sad to think about, isn't it. Eventually, I was even picked up and used as a simple building block in a wall for a fort near a town called Rosetta. My incredible secret was hidden in plain sight. But then, on a very hot day, July 15th, 1799, a French soldier named Pierre-François Bouchard was working on the fort. He noticed me sticking out of the wall. He saw my three different types of writing and knew, with a jolt of excitement, that I was more than just a stone. He realized I might hold the key to a great mystery that had puzzled the world for ages.

When scholars and historians across Europe heard about me, they were thrilled. This could be their chance. They could easily read the Greek writing at the bottom, so they knew what the message said. The exciting part was knowing that the other two mysterious scripts said the exact same thing. For the next twenty years, the smartest people tried to match the words and sounds, but it was like the hardest puzzle imaginable. The breakthrough finally came from a brilliant young Frenchman named Jean-François Champollion. In 1822, after years of studying me, he had a clever idea. He realized that the hieroglyphs weren't just pictures of things—many of them stood for sounds, just like the letters in our alphabet. By carefully matching the sounds in the king's name, Ptolemy, which was circled in a special oval shape called a cartouche, he unlocked the entire ancient language. It was like finding a secret map to a hidden treasure.

Suddenly, because of the code I helped him crack, the stories carved on ancient tombs and the words written on papyrus scrolls could be read again. I gave a voice back to the people of ancient Egypt, allowing them to tell us about their lives, their beliefs, and their history. Today, I live in the British Museum in London, where millions of people from all over the world come to see me. I may be just a piece of stone, but I am proof that even when a secret is lost for thousands of years, human curiosity, patience, and teamwork can bring it back to light. I love that I get to connect all of us to the amazing and wonderful stories of the past, and I hope I inspire you to go out and solve some puzzles of your own.