[2026] PTE Academic Reading - Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 by French soldiers in Egypt, provided the key to understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.It is a granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BCE on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three distinct scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek.Because the Greek language was well-known to scholars of the time, the stone acted as a translation guide for the previously undecipherable Egyptian texts. Jean-François Champollion, a French philologist, is credited with the final breakthrough in deciphering the hieroglyphs in 1822.He realized that the script was not purely symbolic but also contained phonetic elements representing sounds. This realization was crucial because earlier attempts had failed by assuming each hieroglyph represented a single word or idea.The decipherment allowed historians to read thousands of years of Egyptian records, transforming our understanding of their civilization. Today, the Rosetta Stone is housed in the British Museum, where it remains one of the most visited objects in the collection.Its name has since become a metaphor for any essential clue that helps solve a complex problem or decode mysterious information