Rosetta Stone Trivia
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63 free Rosetta Stone trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rosetta Stone trivia is really three stories in one. The first is ancient: a priestly decree of 196 BC flattering a boy-king, carved in three scripts and stuck in a temple that was later quarried for a Mamluk fort. The second is imperial: French soldiers pulling it out of a wall in 1799, British generals prising it out of a French general's baggage two years later, and a museum in London that has shown it almost every day since 1802. The third is intellectual: two decades of rival scholars staring at cartouches until Champollion ran through the streets shouting that he had it. This quiz covers all three. You will meet Ptolemy V and his murdered parents, the priests at their congress, granodiorite and carnauba wax, Bouchard, Menou and the gun-carriage, Silvestre de Sacy and Åkerblad, Thomas Young's 80 similarities, the Lettre à M. Dacier, the wartime hiding place under a Post Office railway, Zahi Hawass's repatriation demands, and the way 'Rosetta stone' became a metaphor for everything from immunology to a comet mission. Easy questions suit anyone who has seen it through the crowds; expert ones assume you know the museum inventory number. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Rosetta Stone and Champollion, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 63 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Rosetta Stone was found in the delta of which river?
The Nile
The Nile: the stone turned up near Rashid, where a branch of the river meets the sea. It had probably stood in a temple before being carted off and built into a wall as rubble.
Q 02Visitors to the museum that holds the Rosetta Stone are invited to do what with a copy kept in another gallery?
Touch it
Touch it: the copy stands in the open, just as the real stone did when it first went on show. The original proved too tempting to visitors' fingers and has long since been shut away behind glass.
Q 03The Rosetta Stone gave its name to a well-known brand of what?
Language-learning software
Language-learning software: Rosetta Stone, launched in 1992, borrows the stone's fame as the key to a lost language. Its method is the reverse of the decipherers', teaching with pictures and sounds and no translation at all.
Q 04Europe's Rosetta space probe carried a comet lander named after which Egyptian island?
Philae
Philae: a monument from the island carried a second two-language inscription that gave Champollion his final clues, so the European Space Agency named the lander after it and the mother ship after the stone.
Q 05Which French leader's 1798 invasion of Egypt led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone?
Napoleon
Napoleon sailed home soon after the find, leaving his army and the stone behind. When that army surrendered, the stone passed to the British as a prize of war, which is why France's great find has spent two centuries abroad.
Q 06When the Rosetta Stone was carved, Egypt's kings descended from which conqueror's general?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great's death left Egypt to one of his generals, who made himself king; that general's family then held the throne for almost three centuries.
Q 07The Rosetta Stone's decree of 196 BC was issued on behalf of which ruler of Egypt?
Ptolemy V Epiphanes
Ptolemy V Epiphanes was about 13 when Egypt's priests issued it: in return for his gifts of silver and grain to their temples, they pledged to keep his birthday as a festival.
Q 08The Rosetta Stone, long mislabelled as black basalt, is actually made of which rock?
Granodiorite
Granodiorite: the French newspaper that announced the find called it black granite, and reference books were still describing a basalt slab two centuries later.
Q 09Which French engineer lieutenant is credited with finding the Rosetta Stone as his men demolished an old wall?
Pierre-François Bouchard
Pierre-François Bouchard was overseeing repairs to a run-down fort when the slab turned up; he saw at once that it mattered and escorted it to the scholars in Cairo himself.
Q 10What are the oval rings around royal names on the Rosetta Stone called?
Cartouches
Cartouches: scholars guessed the rings held royal names, so the name repeated inside them on the stone gave the first hieroglyphs with known sounds. The French word means a gun cartridge.
Q 11What shows a reader of hieroglyphs, as on the Rosetta Stone, which end of a line to start from?
The way the figures face
The way the figures face: birds, animals and people all look towards the start of the line, which let scribes run a text to the left or to the right.
Q 12Which 1801 agreement handed the Rosetta Stone to Britain?
The Capitulation of Alexandria
The Capitulation of Alexandria: its sixteenth article gave up everything the French scholars had collected, and their commander's claim that the stone was his own property got him nowhere.
Q 13Which captured French frigate carried the Rosetta Stone to England in 1802?
HMS Égyptienne
Q 21Demotic, the name of the Rosetta Stone's middle script, comes from a Greek word meaning what?
Of the people
Of the people: demotic was Egypt's everyday handwriting, and because its band of text survived best of the three on the stone, the first attempts at decipherment began there.
Q 22By family legend, what did Champollion do after shouting 'Je tiens mon affaire!'?
Collapsed in a faint
Collapsed in a faint: the cry means 'I've got it!', and the story goes that he lay senseless for days before getting up to present his discovery in Paris later that month.
Q 23Champollion's grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris is marked by which Egyptian-style monument?
A simple obelisk
HMS Égyptienne had been seized from the French only months earlier, and the officer escorting the stone sailed in her himself, 'determining to share its fate'.
Q 14Which British admiral wrecked the French fleet off Egypt in 1798, stranding the army that found the Rosetta Stone?
Horatio Nelson
Horatio Nelson destroyed or captured most of the French ships, trapping the army in Egypt; three years later it had to hand its finds, the stone among them, to the British.
Q 15Inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone say it was 'Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801' and 'Presented by' whom?
King George III
King George III: the escorting officer's orders were to present the slab to the King, who gave it to the nation within months. Both lines are painted on its sides.
Q 16Scholars guessed the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphs spelled foreign names by sound after seeing how which script writes them?
Chinese
Chinese: its writers pick characters for their sounds alone to spell a foreign name, and scholars reasoned that Egyptian scribes had done the same with the foreign names on the stone.
Q 17Which British polymath found the signs spelling 'Ptolemaios' in the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphs?
Thomas Young
Thomas Young, the physicist famed for his work on light, read the royal name but then stalled, because he believed hieroglyphs spelled out sounds only for foreign names.
Q 18The word 'hieroglyph' comes from Greek words meaning what?
Sacred carvings
Sacred carvings, from hieros and glyphe: the Greeks who coined the word believed the signs were holy symbols, a belief that kept later scholars hunting for mystical meanings instead of sounds.
Q 19Alongside 'Ptolemaios', which royal name did Champollion read phonetically from an obelisk in 1822?
Cleopatra
Cleopatra shares the sounds p, o and l with the other name, so signs Champollion had guessed from one could be tested against the second, and the matches gave him the start of an alphabet.
Q 20By the traditional account, Champollion's breakthrough in September 1822 came from reading which two native pharaohs' names?
Ramesses and Thutmose
Ramesses and Thutmose were native Egyptian names many centuries older than the stone, so reading them showed hieroglyphs spelled out sounds in ordinary Egyptian words, not only in foreign names.
A simple obelisk: the plain stone needle carries the name 'Champollion le Jeune', the Younger, which set him apart from the elder brother who was a scholar too.
Q 24Champollion's English rival published his readings of the Rosetta Stone in 1819 in which reference work?
Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica: his long article 'Egypt' gave his readings of a few names, but he could get no further, and three years later Champollion overtook him.
Q 25When the Rosetta Stone's boy-king was crowned, Egypt had recently lost which land to the Seleucids?
Judaea
Judaea: the Seleucid king Antiochus III had beaten Egypt's army at Panium, and rebels still held the south of the country when the boy was crowned.
Q 26The Rosetta Stone's decree was issued by priests gathered in which city, the ancient capital of Egypt?
Memphis
Memphis: by then the court sat on the coast, so holding the ceremony in the old capital tied the young king to the pharaohs of the past and to the priests whose support he needed.
Q 27Champollion's decisive insight was that hieroglyphs are which kind of script?
Part sounds, part symbols
Part sounds, part symbols: one sign may spell a sound while the next stands for a whole word or idea, which is why reading the script as pure picture-code had failed for centuries.
Q 28Why is much of the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphic text missing?
Its top broke off
Its top broke off: the stone is only part of a taller monument, and although the site where it was found has been searched, no missing piece has ever turned up.
Q 29Egypt was a province of which empire when French troops found the Rosetta Stone there in 1799?
The Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire had held Egypt since 1517, and its troops fought beside the British to drive the French out, so in 1801 the French gave up the country to both allies.
Q 30A marble tablet to Champollion's English rival hangs in which London church?
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey: the epitaph credits him, not Champollion, with being first to penetrate 'the obscurity which had veiled for ages the hieroglyphicks of Egypt'.