Napoleon's Role Discovering, Preserving Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta stone is an Egyptian engraved stone bearing a tri-lingual decree dated 197 BC inscribed in Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek text. It was rediscovered by Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard on 19 July, 1799, during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. The find was published in the Courier de l'Egypte, a periodical in Cairo at the time.
“Among the fortification works that the citizen D'Hautpoul, chef de bataillon of the Génie, has carried out on the old Rashid fort (now called Fort Julien) on the left bank of the Nile, […] a beautiful black granite stone, of fine grain and hard as a hammer, was excavated. The stone is 36 inches high, 28 inches wide and 9-10 inches in depth. Only one side is polished, and on it are thee distinct inscriptions, separated into three parallel strips. The first and uppermost is written in hieroglyphic characters: there are fourteen lines of characters, but part has been lost as a result of damage to the stone. The second and middle strip is written using characters which are believed to be Syriac; it includes thirty-two lines. The third and last section is written in Greek; it has fifty-four lines of very fine, very well sculpted characters which, as is the case for the characters in the two superior sections, are very well preserved.