The Rosetta Stone, discovered in a pile of rubble in 1799, proved to be the key to unlocking a lost language that baffled scholars for centuries. Carved in ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone carried the same message in different languages—in Greek, Egyptian and demotic, an old Egyptian script. It offered the chance for scholars to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The intellectual race to decipher the stone lasted 25 years.