tour 9 of 22
Enlightenment: Ancient Scripts
The Rosetta Stone
To hear an audio
description of the Rosetta Stone, written
especially for blind and partially sighted visitors, follow this
link: Audio
description (2m 23s) (mp3 format, 1.64 MB). To
download, right click and 'save target as' (PC) or
hold down 'Control' key and click, and select
'Download Link to Disc'
(Mac).
The inscription on
the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests, one
of a commemorative 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.
A replica of the
Rosetta Stone is on display in Room 1,
Enlightenment: Discovering the World in
the Eighteenth
Century