Soon after the end of the 4th century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out
of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the
early years of the 19th century, scholars were able to use the Greek
inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas
Young (1773–1829), an English physicist, was the first to show that  some
of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a roy royal name thats of ptolemy The French scholar Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) then
realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language
and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language
and culture. Champollion made a crucial step in understanding ancient
Egyptian writing when he pieced together the alphabet of hieroglyphs that
was used to write the names of non-Egyptian rulers. He announced his
discovery, which had been based on analysis of the Rosetta Stone and
other texts, in a paper at the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres at
Paris on Friday 27 September 1822. The audience included his English
rival Thomas Young, who was also trying to decipher Egyptian