In July 1799, while serving in Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, the French officer Pierre-François Bouchard made a fateful discovery. It was a large slab of granodiorite inscribed with three languages: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. The slab became known as the Rosetta Stone and launched a race among scholars to translate its content. It was Jean-François Champollion, a teacher in Grenoble, who eventually identified the phonetic characters “kleopatra” and presented a transliteration in 1822. Celebrating 200 years since Champollion’s breakthrough, and drawing from its deep archival trove, the British Museum takes viewers through the travails of those scholars who cracked the code to 3,000 years of human history. —Elena Clavarino