The story of the Rosetta Stone begins in 1799 when French soldiers, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, discovered the stone in the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta.
During the construction of a fort, a soldier named Pierre-François Bouchard unearthed the slab, which was inscribed with what seemed to be the same text in three different scripts: Greek, Demotic (a form of ancient Egyptian script), and hieroglyphs.
Painting is an ancient medium and even with the introduction of photography, film and digital technology, it still has remained a persistent mode of expression. So many paintings have been limned over dozens of millennia that only a relatively small percentage of them could be construed as "timeless classics" that have become familiar to the public—and not coincidentally produced by some of the most famous artists of all time. We, of course, have our opinion of what makes the grade and we present them here in our list of the best paintings of all time.
