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Rosetta Stone



 
 
The Rosetta Stone is an Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an Ancient history civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile in what is now the modern nation of Egypt....
ian artifact
Artifact (archaeology)

In archaeology, an artifact or artefact is any object made or modified by a human archaeological culture, and often one later recovered by some archaeological endeavor....
 which was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of hieroglyph
Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements....
ic writing. The stone is a Ptolemaic era stele
Stele

A stele is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected for funerals or commemorative purposes, most usually decorated with the names and titles of the deceased or living ? inscribed, carved in relief , or painted onto the slab....
 with carved text made up of three translations of a single passage: two in Egyptian language
Egyptian language

Egyptian is a branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages language family along with the Chadic languages, Berber languages, Semitic languages, Cushitic languages and possibly Omotic languages languages....
 scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic
Demotic (Egyptian)

Demotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic language....
) and one in classical Greek.






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Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is an Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an Ancient history civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile in what is now the modern nation of Egypt....
ian artifact
Artifact (archaeology)

In archaeology, an artifact or artefact is any object made or modified by a human archaeological culture, and often one later recovered by some archaeological endeavor....
 which was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of hieroglyph
Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements....
ic writing. The stone is a Ptolemaic era stele
Stele

A stele is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected for funerals or commemorative purposes, most usually decorated with the names and titles of the deceased or living ? inscribed, carved in relief , or painted onto the slab....
 with carved text made up of three translations of a single passage: two in Egyptian language
Egyptian language

Egyptian is a branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages language family along with the Chadic languages, Berber languages, Semitic languages, Cushitic languages and possibly Omotic languages languages....
 scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic
Demotic (Egyptian)

Demotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic language....
) and one in classical Greek. It was created in 196 BC, discovered by the French in 1799 at Rosetta
Rosetta

Rosetta is a port city on the Mediterranean Sea coast in Egypt. It is located 65 km east of Alexandria, at , in Al Buhayrah Governorate Governorates of Egypt....
 and contributed greatly to the deciphering of the principles of hieroglyph writing in 1822 by the British scientist Thomas Young
Thomas Young (scientist)

Thomas Young was an England polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of Visual perception, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, harmony and Egyptology....
 and the French scholar Jean-François Champollion
Jean-François Champollion

Jean-Fran?ois Champollion was a France classical academia, philology and orientalism.Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs with the help of groundwork laid by his predecessors: Athanasius Kircher, Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Akerblad, Thomas Young , and William John Bankes....
. Comparative translation of the stone assisted in understanding many previously undecipherable
Decipherment

Decipherment is the analysis of documents written in ancient languages, where the language is unknown, or knowledge of the language has been lost....
 examples of hieroglyphic
Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements....
 writing. The text on the stone is a decree from Ptolemy V, describing the repealing of various taxes and instructions to erect statues in temples.

The stone is high at its highest point, wide, and thick it is unfinished on its sides and reverse. Weighing approximately , it was originally thought to be granite
Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of Intrusion , felsic, igneous rock rock . Granite has a medium to coarse texture, occasionally with some individual crystals larger than the groundmass forming a rock known as Porphyry ....
 or basalt
Basalt

Basalt is a common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually gray to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface of a planet....
 but is currently described as granodiorite
Granodiorite

Granodiorite is an intrusive igneous rock similar to granite, but contains more plagioclase than potassium feldspar. It usually contains abundant biotite mica and hornblende, giving it a darker appearance than true granite....
 of a dark pinkish-gray color. The stone has been on public display at The British Museum since 1802.

History


Modern-era discovery

Rosetta Stone
In preparation for Napoleon
Napoleon I of France

Napoleon Bonaparte later known as Emperor Napoleon I, was a military and political leader of France whose actions shaped European politics in the early 19th century....
's 1798 campaign in Egypt, the French founded the Institut de l'Égypte in Cairo
Cairo

Cairo , which means "the triumphant", is the Cairo and largest city of Egypt.It is the most populous metropolitan area in Egypt and is also one of the most populous in the world....
 which brought 167 scientists and archaeologists to the region. French Army
French Army

The French Army, officially the Arm?e de Terre , is the Army component of the Military of France and its largest. As of 2007, the army employs 134,000 regular soldiers, 15,500 reservists, and 25,750 civilians....
 engineer Captain Pierre-François Bouchard
Pierre-François Bouchard

Pierre-Fran?ois Bouchard was a France captain best known for discovering the Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian port city of Rosetta on July 15, 1799....
 discovered the stone sometime - the sources are not specific - in mid-July 1799 , while guiding construction work at Fort Julien near the Egyptian port city of Rashid (Rosetta). The Napoleonic army was so awestruck by this unheralded spectacle that, according to a witness, "it halted of itself and, by one spontaneous impulse, grounded its arms." (As quoted by Robert Claiborne, The Birth of Writing [1974], p. 24.) After Napoleon returned in 1799, 167 scholars remained behind with French troops which held off British and Ottoman attacks. In March 1801, the British landed on Aboukir Bay and scholars carried the Stone from Cairo to Alexandria alongside the troops of Jacques-Francois Menou
Jacques-Francois Menou

Jacques-Fran?ois de Menou, baron de Boussay was a French general under Napoleon I of France. Born Jacques-Francois Menou in Boussay, Indre-et-Loire on 3 September 1750, he died in Mestre in the Veneto on 13 August 1810....
. French troops in Cairo capitulate
Capitulation (surrender)

Capitulation , an agreement in time of war for the surrender to a hostile armed force of a particular body of troops, a town or a territory.It is an ordinary incident of war, and therefore no previous instructions from the captors' government are required before finally settling the conditions of capitulation....
d on June 22, and in Alexandria on August 30.

After the surrender, a dispute arose over the fate of French archaeological and scientific discoveries in Egypt. De Menou refused to hand them over, claiming they belonged to the Institute. British General John Hely-Hutchinson, 2nd Earl of Donoughmore
John Hely-Hutchinson, 2nd Earl of Donoughmore

John Hely-Hutchinson, 2nd Earl of Donoughmore Order of the Bath , was a United Kingdom politician, hereditary peer and soldier.He was the son of John Hely-Hutchinson and the Christiana Hely-Hutchinson, 1st Baroness Donoughmore....
, refused to relieve the city until de Menou gave in. Newly arrived scholars Edward Daniel Clarke
Edward Daniel Clarke

Edward Daniel Clarke , England mineralogist and traveller, was born at Willingdon and Jevington, Sussex, and educated first at Tonbridge.In 1786 he obtained the office of chapel clerk at Jesus College, Cambridge, but the loss of his father at this time involved him in difficulties....
 and William Richard Hamilton
William Richard Hamilton

William Richard Hamilton was a British antiquarian and traveller. He was son of Rev. Anthony Hamilton, Archdeacon of Colchester and Anne, daughter of Richard Terrick, Bishop of London....
 agreed to check the collections in Alexandria and found many artifacts that the French had not revealed.

When Hutchinson claimed all materials as a property of the British Crown
The Crown

Throughout the Commonwealth realms, the Crown is an abstract metonymy concept which represents the legal authority for the existence of any government....
, a French scholar, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

?tienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a France natural history who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories....
, said to Clarke and Hamilton that they would rather burn all their discoveries — referring ominously to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria
Library of Alexandria

The Royal Library of Alexandria or Ancient Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was once the largest Great libraries of the ancient world....
 — than turn them over. Hutchinson finally agreed that items such as biology specimens would be the scholars' private property. De Menou regarded the stone as his private property and hid it.

How exactly the Stone came to British hands is disputed. Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who escorted the stone to Britain, claimed later that he had personally seized it from de Menou and carried it away on a gun carriage
Caisson (military)

A limber is a two-wheeled cart designed to support the trail of an artillery piece, allowing it to be towed. A caisson is a two-wheeled cart designed to carry ammunition; it was frequently towed before the limber....
. Clarke stated in his memoirs that a French scholar and an officer had quietly given up the stone to him and his companions in a Cairo back street. French scholars departed later with only imprints and plaster casts of the stone.

Rosetta Stone International Congress of Orientalists Iln 1874
Turner brought the stone to Britain aboard the captured French frigate
Frigate

A frigate is a warship. The term has been used for warships of many sizes and roles over the past few centuries.In the 18th century, the term referred to ships which were as long as a ship-of-the-line and were square rig on all three masts , but were faster and with lighter armament, used for patrolling and escort....
 L'Egyptienne in February 1802. On March 11, it was presented to the Society of Antiquaries of London
Society of Antiquaries of London

The Society of Antiquaries of London is the world?s premier Learned Society for heritage. It is based at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London in the United Kingdom, along with the Royal Academy and four other leading Learned Societies; the Linnean Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Geological Society of London and the Royal Astrono...
. Later it was taken to the British Museum
British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture situated in London. Its collections, which number more than 7 million Object , are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present....
, where it remains to this day. Inscriptions painted in white on the artifact state "Captured in Egypt by the British Army
British Army

The British Army is the Army branch of the British Armed Forces. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdoms of Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707....
 in 1801" on the left side and "Presented by King George III
George III of the United Kingdom

George III was Kingdom of Great Britain and Kingdom of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of these two countries on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death....
" on the right.

Translation

In 1814, the Briton Thomas Young
Thomas Young (scientist)

Thomas Young was an England polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of Visual perception, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, harmony and Egyptology....
 finished translating the enchorial (demotic
Demotic (Egyptian)

Demotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic language....
) text, and began work on the hieroglyphic script
Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements....
. From 1822 to 1824 the French scholar, philologist, and orientalist Jean-François Champollion
Jean-François Champollion

Jean-Fran?ois Champollion was a France classical academia, philology and orientalism.Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs with the help of groundwork laid by his predecessors: Athanasius Kircher, Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Akerblad, Thomas Young , and William John Bankes....
 greatly expanded on this work and is credited as the principal translator of the Rosetta Stone. Champollion could read both Greek and Coptic
Coptic language

Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the final stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic languages language spoken in Egypt until at least the seventeenth century....
, and figured out what the seven Demotic signs in Coptic were. By looking at how these signs were used in Coptic, he worked out what they meant. Then he traced the Demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs. By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he transliterated the text from the Demotic (or older coptic) and Greek to the Hierolgphs by first translating Greek names which were originally in Greek, then working towards ancient names that had never been written in any other languages. From that he created an alphabet to decipher all the other mysteries of Ancient Egypt.

In 1858, the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania published the first complete English translation of the Rosetta Stone as accomplished by three of its undergraduate members: Charles R Hale, S Huntington Jones, and Henry Morton. The translation quickly sold out two editions and was internationally hailed as a monumental work of scholarship. In 1988, the British Museum bestowed the honor of including the Philomathean Rosetta Stone Report in its select bibliography of the most important works ever published on the Rosetta Stone. The Philomathean Society maintains a full-scale mold of the stone in its meeting room at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is America's first university and is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States....
.

Recent history

The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited almost continuously in the British Museum since 1802. Toward the end of World War I
World War I

World War I, or the First World War , was a global military conflict which involved the Great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War I and the Central Powers....
, in 1917, the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London and moved the Rosetta Stone to safety along with other portable objects of value. The Stone spent the next two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below the ground at Holborn.

The Stone left the British Museum
British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture situated in London. Its collections, which number more than 7 million Object , are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present....
 again in October 1972 to be exhibited for one month at the Louvre Museum on the 150th anniversary of the decipherment
Decipherment

Decipherment is the analysis of documents written in ancient languages, where the language is unknown, or knowledge of the language has been lost....
 of hieroglyphic writings with the famous Lettre a M Dacier of Jean-François Champollion
Jean-François Champollion

Jean-Fran?ois Champollion was a France classical academia, philology and orientalism.Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs with the help of groundwork laid by his predecessors: Athanasius Kircher, Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Akerblad, Thomas Young , and William John Bankes....
.

In July 2003, Egypt demanded the return of the Rosetta Stone. Dr. Zahi Hawass
Zahi Hawass

Zahi Hawass is an Egyptians archaeology and List of Egyptologists and the current Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities....
, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities
Supreme Council of Antiquities

The Supreme Council of Antiquities is part of the Egypt Ministry of Culture and is responsible for the conservation, protection and regulation of all antiquities and archaeological excavations in Egypt....
 in Cairo, told the press: "If the British want to be remembered, if they want to restore their reputation, they should volunteer to return the Rosetta Stone because it is the icon of our Egyptian identity." In 2005, Hawass was negotiating for a three-month loan, with the eventual goal of a permanent return. In November 2005, the British Museum sent him a replica of the stone.

Abbreviated-synopsis in English (eighth of text)


The complete Greek text, in English, is about 1600–1700 words in length, and is about 20 paragraphs long (average 80 words per paragraph). In essence, the Rosetta Stone is a tax amnesty given to the temple priests of the day, restoring the tax privileges they had traditionally enjoyed from more ancient times. Some scholars speculate that several copies of the Rosetta Stone must exist, as yet undiscovered, since this proclamation must have been made at many temples.

Idiomatic use

The term Rosetta Stone has become idiom
Idiom

An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be determined by the literal definition of the phrase itself, but refers instead to a figurative language meaning that is known only through common use....
atic as something that is a critical key to a process of decryption or translation of a difficult problem:

"The Rosetta Stone of immunology" and "Arabidopsis
Arabidopsis

Arabidopsis is a genus in the family Brassicaceae. They are small flowering plants related to cabbage and Mustard plant. This genus is of great interest since it contains thale cress , one of the model organisms used for studying plant biology and the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced....
, the Rosetta Stone of flowering time (fossils)". An algorithm for predicting protein structure
Protein structure

Proteins are an important class of biological macromolecules present in all biological organisms, made up of such chemical element as carbon,hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulphur....
 from sequence is named Rosetta@home
Rosetta@home

Rosetta@home is a distributed computing project for protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform, run by the David Baker at the University of Washington....
. In molecular biology, a series of "Rosetta" bacterial cell lines have been developed that contain a number of tRNA genes that are rare in E. coli but common in other organisms, enabling the efficient translation of DNA
DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetics instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and some viruses....
 from those organisms in E. coli.

"Rosetta" is the name of a "lightweight dynamic translator" distributed for Mac OS X by Apple
Apple Computer

Apple Inc., formerly Apple Computer Inc., is an United States multinational corporation which designs and manufactures consumer electronics and software products....
. Rosetta enables applications compiled for a RISC processor (PowerPC
PowerPC

PowerPC is a RISC instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Apple Inc.?IBM?Motorola alliance, known as AIM alliance. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded system and high-performance processors....
) to run on Apple systems using a CISC
Complex instruction set computer

A complex instruction set computer is a computer instruction set architecture in which each instruction can execute several low-level operations, such as a load from Memory , an arithmetic operator, and a memory , all in a single instruction....
 (x86) processor.

Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone (software)

Rosetta Stone is proprietary software language-learning software produced by Rosetta Stone, Ltd. Its title and its logo are an allusion to the Rosetta Stone, an artifact inscribed in multiple languages that helped Jean Francois Champollion to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics by comparing the inscriptions of the Coptic language, a version of sp...
 is the brand of a language learning software limited corporation headquartered in Arlington, VA, USA.

The Rosetta Project
Rosetta Project

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 11th millennium and beyond AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation....
 is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages.

See also

  • Rosetta (disambiguation)
    Rosetta (disambiguation)

    Rosetta may refer to:As a placename:* Rosetta, the anglicised name of the city of Rashid, Egypt, famous as the location of the Rosetta Stone...
  • Behistun Inscription
    Behistun Inscription

    The Behistun Inscription is a multi-lingual inscription located on Mount Behistun in the Kermanshah Province of Iran, near the town of Jeyhounabad in western Iran....


Theodore Geisel also used "Rosetta Stone" as a pen name while writing the Dr. Seuss children books.

Further reading

  • Allen, Don Cameron. "The Predecessors of Champollion", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 144, No. 5. (1960), pp. 527–547
  • Adkins, Lesley; Adkins, Roy. The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs. HarperCollins, 2000 ISBN 0060194391*Downs, Jonathan. Discovery at Rosetta. Skyhorse Publishing, 2008 ISBN 978-1-60239-271-7
  • Downs, Jonathan. "Romancing the Stone", History Today, Vol. 56, Issue 5. (May, 2006), pp. 48–54.
  • Parkinson, Richard. Cracking Codes: the Rosetta Stone, and Decipherment. University of California Press, 1999 ISBN 0520223063
  • Parkinson, Richard. The Rosetta Stone. Objects in Focus; British Museum Press 2005 ISBN 9780714150215
  • Ray, John. The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt. Harvard University Press, 2007 ISBN 9780674024939
    • by Jonathon Keats in the , July 22, 2007.
  • Solé, Robert; Valbelle, Dominique. The Rosetta Stone: The Story of the Decoding of Hieroglyphics. Basic Books, 2002 ISBN 1568582269


External links