The Rosetta Stone
From Fort St Julien, el-Rashid (Rosetta),
Egypt, Ptolemaic Period, 196 BC
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A valuable key to the decipherment of
hieroglyphs, the inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree
passed by a council of priests. It is one of a series that affirm
the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first
anniversary of his coronation.
In previous years the family of the Ptolemies had lost control
of certain parts of the country. It had taken their armies some
time to put down opposition in the Delta, and parts of southern
Upper Egypt, particularly Thebes, were not yet back under the
government's control.
Before the Ptolemaic era (that is before about 332 BC), decrees
in hieroglyphs such as this were usually set up by the king. It
shows how much things had changed from Pharaonic times that the
priests, the only people who had kept the knowledge of writing
hieroglyphs, were now issuing such decrees. The list of good deeds
done by the king for the temples hints at the way in which the
support of the priests was ensured.
The decree is inscribed on the stone three times, in
hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native
script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the
administration). The importance of this to Egyptology is
immense.
Soon after the end of the fourth century AD, when hieroglyphs
had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them
disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some
1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription
on this stone as the key to decipher them.
Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that
some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a
royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François
Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of
the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of
ancient Egyptian language and culture.
Soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799
while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the
town of el-Rashid (Rosetta). On Napoleon's defeat, the stone became
the property of the British under the terms of the Treaty of
Alexandria (1801) along with other antiquities that the French had
found.
The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited in the British Museum since
1802, with only one break. Towards the end of the First World War,
in 1917, when the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing in
London, they moved it to safety along with other, portable,
'important' objects. The Rosetta Stone spent the next two years in
a station on the Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below the ground
at Holborn.
Conserving the Rosetta Stone
In 1999, the Rosetta Stone was the centrepiece of the British
Museum exhibition Cracking Codes. As part of the
exhibition preparations, the opportunity was taken
to investigate and clean this famous object.
Translating the Rosetta Stone
Read a full translation of the demotic text on the Rosetta Stone
by R.S. Simpson (Demotic Grammar in the Ptolemaic Sacerdotal
Decrees (Oxford, Griffith Institute, 1996), pp. 258-71).
Read the
translation
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