I.

Introduction

Rosetta Stone, black stone slab with writing in three scripts that provided the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone, which dates from the 2nd century bc, was found by French troops in the Nile Valley of Egypt in 1799. By then the ability to read hieroglyphs had been lost for more than a thousand years. Cracking the code of the hieroglyphs in the early 1800s was enormously important for understanding the history and culture of ancient Egypt.

II.

Finding the Rosetta Stone

In 1798 French general Napoleon Bonaparte sent a naval fleet to challenge British power in Egypt. Many French scholars traveled with the fleet, including geographers, geologists, botanists, and linguists. During France’s three-year occupation of the Nile Valley, the French expedition collected a vast amount of information about Egypt and a great number of Egyptian antiquities. The most spectacular of these antiquities was the Rosetta Stone, which was found in 1799 at a fort at Rashîd, a town near the mouth of the Nile that was known as Rosetta to Europeans.

Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign foundered, and his forces surrendered to Britain in 1801. Under the subsequent treaty, the Rosetta Stone, along with many other Egyptian antiquities, became the property of Britain. These antiquities formed the basis of the Egyptian collection of the British Museum in London. The Rosetta Stone has been on display at the British Museum since 1802. The stone was long thought to be of basalt but is now believed to be a type of volcanic rock that resembles granite and is known as granitoid.

III.

Significance of the Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone was inscribed in 196 bc with a decree praising 13-year-old Egyptian king Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. The inscription appears in three scripts, hieroglyphic (an ancient Egyptian script using symbols), demotic (a simplified Egyptian script used for everyday writing), and Greek (the language introduced after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great). Because scholars could read Greek with no problem and the three texts recorded the same decree, the Rosetta Stone was quickly recognized as a stupendous discovery.

IV.

Deciphering the Rosetta Stone

Before turning the Rosetta Stone over to Britain, the French made copies of its inscriptions. Scholars in France soon began to study these inscriptions. They translated the Greek text first. The last sentence of the Greek text indicated that the other two passages were in demotic Egyptian and hieroglyphic. One French scholar had already proposed that hieroglyphs surrounded by an oval outline, called a cartouche, represented proper names, particularly the names of Egyptian rulers. The hunt to match words in the three texts began with names.

Two men tackled the demotic text: Silvestre de Sacy of France and his student, Johann David Åkerblad of Sweden. Because demotic was a cursive script—with individual letters joined as in handwriting—they hoped that it was phonetic—that is, that the letters represented sounds. Åkerblad got farther than de Sacy in the effort to match the many proper names in the Greek text with their demotic counterparts. Åkerblad relied on his knowledge of Coptic, a language that had descended from ancient Egyptian. But neither man got very far.

British physicist Thomas Young, who had mastered many languages, also hoped to decipher the Rosetta Stone. He started with Åkerblad’s list of names and places. By this time several names had been identified, including those of Ptolemy and his wife and sister, Cleopatra. Young counted words that appeared frequently in the Greek text and then tried to match them with Egyptian hieroglyphs by counting how often those hieroglyphs occurred. By identifying the various titles that appeared with the name of a pharaoh (king), Young worked out a number of Egyptian signs. He published his findings in 1819.

French linguist Jean François Champollion built on the work of Young and completed the task of unraveling the hieroglyphic system. Champollion established that characters in demotic script corresponded to the hieroglyphs they resembled. In 1824, after years of studying the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone, he published Summary of the Hieroglyphic System of the Ancient Egyptians, a paper showing that hieroglyphs stood for sounds. Until then, most people who had studied hieroglyphic thought that these picture-symbols represented ideas, and they came up with imaginative but half-baked notions of what the texts said. By deciphering the system of writing on the Rosetta Stone, Champollion was able to produce a dictionary and grammar of the ancient Egyptian language. As a result of his research and research that followed, trained scholars today can read hieroglyphic texts with ease.

V.

The Meaning of the Inscriptions

The Rosetta Stone records a decree passed by the priests of Memphis, in ancient Egypt, to honor the pharaoh Ptolemy for his generosity to the temples and priesthood. It includes quotations from proclamations by which the pharaoh attempted to improve the poor conditions in Egypt at the time—196 bc. These quotations indicate that the Egyptian people were oppressed by debt, bandits, and civil war; that agricultural fields had been abandoned; and that Egypt’s all-important irrigation system had been neglected. The priests express their gratitude and the gratitude of all the people for the corrective measures Ptolemy took, such as forgiving debt and relieving men from forced military service. The decree closes with the resolution that it be inscribed on “hard stone” in the “sacred, the native, and the Greek letters.”