The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I say the same thing three times, and that is the entire reason I matter.
The text itself is dull — a tax decree about a teenage king.
Soldiers rebuilding a fort found me, and I was carried off as a spoil of war.
I handed back a language that had been silent for fourteen centuries.
The slab that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Rosetta Stone
The content is pure bureaucracy: a priestly decree about tax relief. Its value was entirely that somebody had bothered to write it out in Greek as well.
The text is a decree issued by priests at Memphis in 196 BC, confirming the cult of a thirteen-year-old Ptolemy V and adjusting some taxes. It was written three times — hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek — because that was the audience. French soldiers rebuilding a fort at el-Rashid found it in 1799; the British took it two years later along with the rest of the collection. Because scholars could read the Greek, they had a key, and after two decades of work Champollion realised the hieroglyphs recorded sounds as well as ideas, and a silent language began speaking.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #49 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #48. Next: mystery #50. Or try #20, #21, #22, #23, #24, #25.