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The Rosetta Stone is a stele inscribed with three versions of a decree issued by Ptolemy V Epiphanes, a Ptolemaic king of Egypt, in 196 BC. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle text is Demotic script, and the lower text is Ancient Greek. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 by French soldiers during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. It played a key role in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1822.