The Rosetta Stone
by Wendy AronThe Rosetta Stone is one of those wonderful chance archaeological discoveries that changed history. In 1799, Napoleon’s French army invaded Egypt and stumbled across the six foot high piece of granite. The Rosetta Stone stands near the end of the almost four-thousand-year-long history of the hieroglyphic script, which was first written around 3300 BC. Like any language, including English, the ancient Egyptian language changed over centuries. The Rosetta Stone records two stages of this language: an archaic formal language used for inscriptions, and a more contemporary form called Demotic. Hieroglyphs record this language with a mixed system of sound signs and picture signs
Literally, the moment the Egyptian Rosetta Stone arrived at the French Institute in Cairo, the experts there recognized that this really was the way in which it might be possible to decipher hieroglyphs. The Greek was the key for carved above the Greek inscriptions on the Egyptian Rosetta Stone was the same message in the forgotten hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Because Greek was known to scholars, it provided the key to decoding the language of the Pharaohs. Now, thousand of years of ancient Egyptian writings could be translated. After centuries of silence, Egyptian voices could be heard once more with the Rosetta Stone translation.
The Greek inscription was used by scholars as the key to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs in the first section. Thomas Young, the English physicist, was the first to prove that the elongated ovals or cartouches in the hieroglyphic section of the Rosetta Stone contained a royal name written phonetically, in this case that of Ptolemy. The French scholar J-F Champollion went on to correct and enlarge Young's list of phonetic hieroglyphs and lay the foundations of our knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language in a paper read to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres in Paris in 1822.
The Rosetta Stone translation revealed that the artifact could be dated to March 196 BC, in the 9th year of Ptolemy V. The Ptolemies were Greeks who had been ruling Egypt since the fragmentation of the Empire of Alexander the Great. While they built temples in the Egyptian style, their lifestyle and language remained exclusively Greek. Egypt had by now become a multi-cultural society, a mixture of Greek and Egyptian, although in many
parts of the country the two cultures never even mixed
In the years preceding the setting up of the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, control of certain parts of Egypt had been lost to the family of the Ptolemies, and it had taken the Ptolemaic armies some time to put down opposition in certain parts of the country, especially the southern Upper Egyptian city of Thebes. The government had yet to gain back control of some of these areas. The Rosetta Stone translation indicates that it was decided that the best way to emphasize the legitimacy of the 13 year old Ptolemy V in the eyes of the Egyptian elite was to re-emphasize his traditional royal credentials with a coronation ceremony in the city of Memphis, and to affirm his royal cult throughout Egypt. This second aim was done through a series of priestly decrees, of which the Rosetta Stone is by far the best-known example. It is a version of the decree issued at the city of Memphis; other decrees include the Canopus decree in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
It took over one hundred years, and the efforts of many scholars, to translate all three passages of writing on the Rosetta Stone. Young, Champollion and others all made some progress in translating the demotic passage. But the first scholar who fully understood the symbols in the demotic text of the Rosetta Stone was a German, Heinrich Karl Brugsch. He published a Rosetta Stone translation in 1850. An even more thorough version was published by another German scholar, Dr. J.J. Hess in 1902. An English Rosetta Stone translation was first acheived in 1904. A few sections still remain unclear, though. This makes present-day experts hope that an even more complete copy of the hieroglyphic inscription may yet be found somewhere in Egypt.
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone along with the paintings of Napoleon’s artists provided the West with a window into the magical land of the Pharaohs and Kings who built magnificent monuments and were rumored to have learned the secrets of eternal life. The world fell in love with Egypt and to this day, thousands of tourists still flock to see the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, where it is now kept.
