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The Rosetta Stone
From Fort St Julien, el-Rashid (Rosetta),
Egypt
Ptolemaic Period, 196 BC
Valuable key to the decipherment of
hieroglyphs
The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a
council of priests, 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 English 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 fifty feet below the ground at
Holborn.
C.A.R. Andrews, The Rosetta Stone-1 (London, The British Museum Press, 1982)
R. Parkinson, The Rosetta Stone (London, British Museum Press, 2005)
R. Parkinson, Cracking codes: the Rosetta St (London, The British Museum Press, 1999)
C.A.R. Andrews and S. Quirke, The Rosetta Stone: facsimile d (London, The British Museum Press, 1988)
R.S. Simpson, Demotic grammar in the Ptolema (Oxford, Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, 1996)