Jonathan Downs Livres

In 1798, young French general Napoleon Bonaparte entered Egypt with a veteran army and a specialist group of savants―scientists, engineers, and artists―his aim being not just conquest, but the rediscovery of the lost Nile kingdom. A year later, in the ruins of an old fort in the small port of Rosetta, the savants made a startling a large, flat stone, inscribed in Greek, demotic Egyptian, and ancient hieroglyphics. This was the Rosetta Stone, key to the two-thousand-year mystery of hieroglyphs, and to Egypt itself. Two years later, French forces retreated before the English and Ottoman armies, but would not give up the stone. Caught between the opposing generals at the siege of Alexandria, British special agents went in to find the Rosetta Stone, rescue the French savants, and secure a fragile peace treaty.Discovery at Rosetta uses French, Egyptian, and English eyewitness accounts to tell the complete story of the discovery, decipherment, and capture of the Rosetta Stone, investigating the rivalries and politics of the time, and the fate of the stone today.

The narrative centers on the pivotal discovery of the Rosetta Stone by French army engineers in 1799, which unlocked the mysteries of ancient Egypt and ignited a cultural rivalry. This artifact, found in a dilapidated castle near the Nile, became a crucial key to understanding an ancient civilization. The book details its journey into British possession, the fierce competition to decipher its inscriptions, and its eventual home in the British Museum, highlighting its significance as a symbol of discovery, conquest, and scholarship.