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Hello, the Rosetta Stone may be the most famous museum object in the world,

or perhaps not the most imposing.

It's a damaged dark granite block

about the height of a child starting school,

and on it you can faintly see three texts engraved in Greek,

demotic, and hieroglyphs.

Napoleon's soldiers found it in an Egyptian fort,

and realized the Greek words could help unlock the hieroglyphs,

then the Silla mystery, and so it proved,

revealing to us three millennia of Egyptian culture.

With me to discuss the Rosetta Stone,

our Penilope Wilson, Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Durham University,

Campbell Price, Creative Egypt and Sedan at the Manchester Museum,

and Richard Bruce Parkinson, Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of the Queen's College University of Oxford.

Richard Parkinson, you were once a curator of the Rosetta Stone,

the British Museum.

...