This is an article about the Rosetta Stone which dates back to 196 B.C. It describes the rosetta stone and how it was discovered.
The Rosetta stone dates to 196 B.C. The Rosetta stone is a stone tablet bearing three inscriptions in two languages. It became the key for unlocking the lost language of hieroglyphs and provided a portal to the ancient world of Egypt. The Rosetta stone is a black basalt slab that measures almost 45 inches in height, 28 1/2 inches in width, and 11 inches in thickness. Its weight is estimated to be 1,676 pounds. It is largely but not wholly intact, with portions of the upper left, upper right, and lower right missing.
In August 1799, just over a year after Napoleon launched his invasion of Egypt at Alexandria, a great discovery was made. French soldiers were building up their defenses around the area of Fort St. Julian, near the northern city of Rosetta, when a soldier or engineer found in the ruins an ancient stone. With its cryptic inscriptions, it was immediately recognized as an object of great importance. It was sent to Cairo, where it was housed in the Institute d'Egypte. Members of Napoleon's special civilian corps dispersed around the country were requested to go there at once.
On the stone were three parallel inscriptions. The top two, hieroglyphic and demotic were in the Egyptian language; the bottom one was Greek. Although the number of lines of each inscription varied, increasing in each section going down the stone, the three sections of inscriptions were roughly the same size. Greek was known, but hieroglyphs had fallen into oblivion some thirteen centuries earlier. Scholars hoped the Greek could be used as the basis to translate the hieroglyphs. An alphabet and grammar could be established, and the meaning of hieroglyphic inscriptions on other antiquities could finally be derived. The ramifications were astounding. Great secrets of the past and new stories of the Bible would be unraveled, all by virtue of this single stone.
Although all the lines of the Greek exhibited some damage, the Greek text on the stone was readily translated. The stone was presumably one of several that had been inscribed following an assembly of priests at Memphis around 200 B.C. The initial high hopes that the Rosetta Stone would be a long awaited key to ancient languages were thwarted for some time. Because some portions of the stone were missing, translating the hieroglyphic and demotic texts by comparing them with the Greek would be difficult. It was still not certain that the three texts bore the same message. Hieroglyphic, or pictorial, script was the most ancient form of Egyptian writing. It was usually chiseled into stone.
Efforts to unravel the philological mystery of ancient Egyptian writing did not begin with the discovery of the Rosetta stone. Since the sixteenth century, scholars had made dedicated attempts to decipher hieroglyphs. The German Jesuit Anthonasius Kircher, the English bishop William Warburton and the French scholar Nicolas Freret were among the most prominent early Egyptologists. Because of the mistakenly held view that hieroglyphs were simply and purely a system of picture writing, however, they came up with rather far-fetched translations.
One of the first to take up the challenge of deciphering the demotic inscription of the Rosetta Stone was renowned Antoine Isaac Silvestre De Sacy of France. He uncovered some proper names mentioned in the text. This view would eventually be shown to be false, but a complete translation of the demotic inscription wouldn't be made public for about half a century.
The enigmatic stone reposed quietly for years in the British Museum, while the general public continued to speculate on the substance of its inscrutable hieroglyphic writing, and scholars labored to break the code. The first breakthrough came around 1816 from a British physicist and medical doctor who had been examining a copy of the Rosetta Stone.
Thomas Young advanced the idea that hieroglyphic characters could have a phonetic value, which meant that the symbols represented sounds of the language. It was commonly believed that in hieroglyphic writing the elliptical figures, in which symbols were enclosed, called cartouches, represented royal names. Young attempted to identify the phonetic value of the symbols in the single cartouche that appears several times in the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta, which he believed to signify the name Ptolemy, and successfully identified several of them.
It was not until the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion set himself to the task of deciphering the Rosetta stone that the riddle of hieroglyphs was finally solved. Using Young's work, his own knowledge of the Coptic language, and other hieroglyphic inscriptions, Champollion was able to determine the phonetic values of other hieroglyphic characters and decipher other royal names. The value of unknown symbol in the cartouches of royal names could be deduced with accuracy by guessing their Greek letter equivalent.
Champollion concluded that the ancient Egyptian language had three forms, hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic and that hieroglyphs were not just symbols signifying ideas but phonetic as well. Champollion's remarkable accomplishment, made with only fourteen incomplete lines of hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone, opened the alphabet of ancient Egypt and all the hieroglyphic writings of the people.
In September 1801 English brevet Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who had fought at Aboukir Bay and Alexandria, went to visit Menou to procure the stone. Turner cited the sixteenth article of the treaty, and General Menou handed it over grudgingly. A squad of artillerymen seized the stone without resistance. As they carted the magnificent ancient treasure through Alexandria, French soldiers and civilians collected on the streets and sputtered insults at them.
In the spasmodic voyage from Egypt to England, many of the Egyptian antiquities were damaged. Because of the importance of the Rosetta Stone, however Colonel Turner personally accompanied this precious cargo on its journey aboard a frigate. The Rosetta stone left Egypt from Alexandria and sailed into the English Channel in February 1802.
At Deptford the stone was placed in a small boat and taken through customs. It was lodged at the quarters of the Society of Antiquaries so experts could examine it before being dispatched to its permanent station of public exhibition in the British Museum in London, England.
