(Ancient.eu.com): Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone

Definition

by Mark Cartwright published on 03 January 2014

 
The Rosetta Stone is an incomplete grey and pink granodiorite stela dating from 196 BCE which presents a priestly decree concerning King Ptolemy V of Egypt. The text is in three different versions: Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, a fact which immeasurably helped to finally decipher hieroglyphics.

Recovery

The stone was discovered at Port Saint Julien, el-Rashid (Rosetta) on the Nile Delta in Egypt in 1799 CE by Pierre François Xavier Bouchard. Bouchard was an officer of engineers in Napoleon's army, and he extracted the stone from an old wall which was being demolished as part of the construction work on Fort Julien. Bouchard's commanding officer, one General Menou, realising its importance, had the stone sent to Alexandria. Casts and copies were made, but the stone was later seized by the British general Tomkins Turner and so the artefact eventually found a permanent home in the British Museum in London.

Several noted international scholars endeavoured to use the stone to decipher hieroglyphics, but it was the Englishman Thomas Young who first identified some of the hieroglyphs which related to Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205-180 BCE) and the direction in which the symbols should be read. However, it was in the early 1820s CE that the text was fully deciphered by Frenchman Jean-François Champollion who discovered that the hieroglyphics were in fact a mixture of alphabetic, determinative and syllabic elements. Consequently, the full significance of Egyptian hieroglyphs, lost for 1600 years, was finally re-discovered.

For the rest, see:
http://www.ancient.eu.com/Rosetta_Stone/