Francesca Lo Iacono                                                   March 19, 2006
English                                                                          Chapter # 2

 

 

 

 

          Rosetta stone is a basalt tablet bearing inscriptions in Greek and in Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic scripts that was discovered in 1799 near Rosetta, a town of northern Egypt in the Nile River delta, and provided the key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics.  The Rosetta stone is a dark grey-pinkish granite stone (originally though to be basalt in composition) with writing on it in two languages, Egyptian and Greek, using three scripts, Hieroglyphic, Demotic Egyptian and Greek.  Because Greek was well known, the stone was the key to deciphering the hieroglyphics.  The stone has been more valuable in helping scholars learn about the ancient Egypt than any of the larger objects in the gallery.  The discovery and translation of the Rosetta stone opened up the world of Ancient Egypt to the modern world.  The Rosetta stone is dated to March 196 BC, in the 9th year of Ptolemy V. The background to the setting up of the stela was the confirmation of the control of the Ptolemaic kings over Egypt.

          The Rosetta stone led to a modern understanding of hieroglyphics.  It made Egypt around 200B.C, it is a stone tablet engraved with writing which celebrate the crowning of King Ptolemy V.  The stone is solid black basalt and is 1M high by 70CM wide by 30CM deep.  The stone is also quite heavy.  The interesting thing about the Rosetta stone is that the writing I repeated three times in different alphabets.  Hieroglyphics, which is the top of the stone, it is used by ancient Egyptians.  Demotic, is the center of the stone, and it is used by Arabs including modern Egyptians.  Greek which is the base of the stone; it is used by, erm, Greeks, and other Eastern Europeans.  Finding the Rosetta stone resulted in a revolutionary change.

          The Rosetta stone inscription was discovered near an ancient town called Rosetta in the Nile Delta in Egypt.  So therefore the Rosetta stone is known by the name of the town.  A French military officer discovered the stone, during the Battle of the Nile, which Napoleon I fought in 1799.  In 1801 when the British defeated the French and took over ancient Egyptian capital Alexandria, the Rosetta stone inscription was taken to England.  Now the Rosetta stone is on display at the British Museum, in London.

          The Rosetta stone is also used as a metaphor to refer to anything that is a critical key to process of decryption, translation, or a difficult problem,  An example is “the Rosetta stone of immunology”, ”thalamo-cortical rhythms, the Rosetta stone of a subset of neurological disorders”, “Arabidopsis, the Rosetta stone of flowering time(fossils).”

          Silvestre deScay, was a French scholar was the first to make any sense of the Demotic script on the Rosetta stone.  He was an important on skilled French linguist.  He identified the symbols which comprised the word “Ptolemy” and “Alexander” thus, establishing a relationship between the symbols and sounds. Johann Akerblad whose history records as a Swedish diplomat, looked at the Rosetta stone with an additional knowledge of Coptic.  Coptic was the language used by the Coptic church of Egypt, which is an early Christian group who presented the language which was used as early as the fourth century.  It was also written with the  Greek alphabet but it utilizes seven additional symbols from the Demotic script.

          The earliest translation of the Greek text on the Rosetta stone into English was done by Reverend Stephen Weston in London in April 1802, before the society of Antiquaries.  Around about this time, both deSacy and Thomas Young attempted to decipher the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone.  Thomas Young was successful in determining that the foreign names could not be represented by symbols because these symbols are bases upon the words used in a given language.  Also foreign names had to be spelled phonetically

The stone was re-discovered in 1799 AD at Rosetta near Rashid, about 200KN, north of Cairo on the Mediterranean coast.  At the time, the meaning of hieroglyphics had been forgotten.  Nobody could translate any of the hieroglyphics found whilst raiding/exploring ancient’s Egyptian archeology.  However, the Rosetta stone change all that.  Because people of the nineteenth century could understand the Demotic and Greek parts of the engravings, a chap called Jean-Francois Champillon worked out which words were represented by which hieroglyphics in 1821AD.  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.