Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to
deciphering the writings of Ancient Egypt, was discovered near the town
of Rosetta (now Rashid), located in the Nile Delta about 40 miles
northeast of Alexandria, by a Frenchman, Pierre Bouchard, on 15 July
1799. Captain Bouchard, an engineer officer in Napoleon's expedition to
Egypt, was supervising the reconstruction of an old fort, as part of the
preparations for defending the French from attacks by British and
Turkish forces in the area. The Rosetta Stone came to light during the
demolition of a wall in the fort. Captain Bouchard saw that the polished
black basalt stone contained three sections of different types of
writing, and recognized its significance immediately. He sent the stone
to Cairo, to the scholars who also accompanied the French expedition to
Egypt.
In 1801, after two years of warding off attacks by
the British, and after their defeat at Abuquir Bay, the French forces in
Egypt surrendered. Under the terms of the Treaty of Capitulation, all
antiquities in the possession of the French, including the Rosetta
Stone, were ceded to the British.
Today, the original Rosetta Stone is in the
British Museum, in London. The McClung Museum has a replica of this
famous stone.
The stone is inscribed with a decree issued by a
gathering of priests in the city of Memphis in 196 BC. The decree
commemorates the first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V
Epiphanes as pharaoh (king) of Egypt, and praises his accomplishments in
that first year. Although the proclamation itself has only minor
significance, the stone is important because the inscription appears in
two languages, Egyptian and Greek, and bears the same text in three
scripts:
- At the top -- 14
lines of hieroglyphs
- In the center -- 32
lines of demotic (a simpler,
cursive, form of hieroglyphic characters which
is much easier to write, and which therefore
became the popular form of writing)
- At the bottom -- 54
lines of Greek
Although scholars had translated the Greek
inscription almost immediately after the Rosetta Stone was discovered,
they could not understand the other two scripts.
In 1808, at the age of 18, the precocious French
linguist and scholar Jean François Champollion began studying a copy of
the Rosetta Stone and the writing system of the ancient Egyptians in an
effort to decipher the mysterious hieroglyphs. Fourteen years later, in
1822, Champollion confirmed that some hieroglyphs were phonograms
(phonetic, or sound, symbols meant to be heard) as well as pictograms
(pictures of words, meant to be seen). In 1824 he published a
groundbreaking book on Egyptian hieroglyphs, in which he set out the
fundamental concepts of hieroglyphic writing, provided an Egyptian
"phonetic alphabet," and noted that Ancient Egyptian writing was a
complex system that was "symbolical and phonetic in the same text, the
same phrase, the same word."
It was this discovery -- that the Egyptian
hieroglyphic writing system used a combination of ideograms, phonetic
signs, and determinatives -- that provided the breakthrough in the
translation of hieroglyphic writing. And this ability to read the
ancient hieroglyphs in turn opened the door to the history of ancient
Egypt and gave birth to the new discipline of Egyptology.
The Rosetta Stone, as seen below, has Egyptian
Hieroglyphs, then demotic, then Greek writings. Deciphering this stone
led to understanding hieroglyphs.
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