The Rosetta Stone, discovered by French soldiers in Egypt in 1799, contains the same decree written in three scripts: Greek, Demotic Egyptian, and hieroglyphics. Because scholars could already read Greek, they were able to use the Greek text as a key to decipher the other two scripts. Jean-François Champollion finally cracked the hieroglyphic code in 1822, opening the door to understanding thousands of years of ancient Egyptian writing that had been indecipherable for centuries.