The
Rosetta Stone is an
ancient EgyptAncient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
ian
granodioriteGranodiorite is an intrusive igneous rock similar to granite, but containing more plagioclase than orthoclase-type feldspar. Officially, it is defined as a phaneritic igneous rock with greater than 20% quartz by volume where at least 65% of the feldspar is plagioclase. It usually contains abundant...
steleA stele , also stela , 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...
inscribedEpigraphy Epigraphy Epigraphy (from the , literally "on-writing", is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; that is, the science of identifying the graphemes and of classifying their use as to cultural context and date, elucidating their meaning and assessing what conclusions can be...
with a
decreeA decree is a rule of law issued by a head of state , according to certain procedures . It has the force of law...
issued at
MemphisMemphis was the ancient capital of Aneb-Hetch, the first nome of Lower Egypt. Its ruins are located near the town of Helwan, south of Cairo.According to legend related by Manetho, the city was founded by the pharaoh Menes around 3000 BC. Capital of Egypt during the Old Kingdom, it remained an...
in 196 BC on behalf of King
Ptolemy VPtolemy V Epiphanes , son of Ptolemy IV Philopator and Arsinoe III of Egypt, was the fifth ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty. He became ruler at the age of five, and under a series of regents the kingdom was paralyzed.-Regency infighting:Ptolemy Epiphanes was only a small boy when his father, Ptolemy...
. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is
Ancient EgyptianEgyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
hieroglyphsEgyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...
, the middle portion
DemoticDemotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and...
script, and the lowest
Ancient GreekAncient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
. Because it presents essentially the same text in all three scripts (with some minor differences between them), it provided the key to the modern understanding of
Egyptian hieroglyphsEgyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...
.
Originally displayed within a
templeEgyptian temples were built for the official worship of the gods and commemoration of pharaohs in Ancient Egypt and in regions under Egyptian control. These temples were seen as houses for the gods or kings to whom they were dedicated...
, the stele was probably moved during the
early ChristianEarly Christianity is generally considered as Christianity before 325. The New Testament's Book of Acts and Epistle to the Galatians records that the first Christian community was centered in Jerusalem and its leaders included James, Peter and John....
or
medieval periodThe Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
and eventually used as building material in the construction of
Fort JulienFort Julien was a fort in Egypt, originally built by the Ottoman Empire and occupied by the French during Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt and Syria between 1798-1801. It stood on the left bank of the Nile a couple of miles north-east of Rashid on the north coast of Egypt...
near the town of
RashidRosetta is a port city on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. It is located east of Alexandria, in Beheira governorate. It was founded around AD 800....
(Rosetta) in the
Nile DeltaThe Nile Delta is the delta formed in Northern Egypt where the Nile River spreads out and drains into the Mediterranean Sea. It is one of the world's largest river deltas—from Alexandria in the west to Port Said in the east, it covers some 240 km of Mediterranean coastline—and is a rich...
. It was rediscovered there in 1799 by a soldier, Pierre-Francois Bouchard, of the French expedition to Egypt. As the first ancient
bilingual textIn epigraphy, a bilingual is an inscription that is extant in two languages . Bilinguals are important for the decipherment of ancient writing systems.Important bilinguals include:...
recovered in modern times, the Rosetta Stone aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher the hitherto untranslated Ancient Egyptian language.
Lithographic copiesLithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
and
plaster castA plaster cast is a copy made in plaster of another 3-dimensional form. The original from which the cast is taken may be a sculpture, building, a face, a fossil or other remains such as fresh or fossilised footprints – particularly in palaeontology .Sometimes a...
s began circulating amongst European museums and scholars. Meanwhile,
British troopsThe British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...
defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, and the original stone came into British possession under the
Capitulation of AlexandriaThe Capitulation of Alexandria in August 1801 brought to an end the French expedition to Egypt.French troops, defeated by British and Ottoman forces, had retreated to Alexandria where they were besieged...
. Transported to London, it has been on public display at the
British MuseumThe British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, 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...
since 1802. It is the most-visited object in the British Museum.
Ever since its rediscovery, the stone has been the focus of nationalist rivalries, including its transfer from French to British possession during the
Napoleonic WarsThe Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
, a long-running dispute over the relative value of Young's and Champollion's contributions to the decipherment, and since 2003, demands for the stone's return to Egypt.
Study of the decree was already under way as the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. It was 20 years, however, before the decipherment of the Egyptian texts was announced by
Jean-François ChampollionJean-François Champollion was a French classical scholar, philologist and orientalist, decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs....
in Paris in 1822; it took longer still before scholars were able to read other Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently. Major advances in the decoding were: recognition that the stone offered three versions of the same text (1799); that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names (1802); that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic (
Thomas YoungThomas Young was an English polymath. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work...
, 1814); and that, in addition to being used for foreign names, phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words (Champollion, 1822–1824).
Two other fragmentary copies of the same decree were discovered later, and several similar Egyptian bilingual or trilingual inscriptions are now known, including two slightly earlier
Ptolemaic decreesThe Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 305 BC to 30 BC, issued these series of decrees over the course of their reign. The Rosetta Stone is a well-known example of one of the decrees....
(the
Decree of CanopusThe Decree of Canopus is a bilingual inscription in two languages, and in three scripts. It was written in three writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic, and Greek, on an ancient Egyptian memorial stone stele, the Stone of Canopus...
in 238 BC, and the
Memphis decree of Ptolemy IVThe Decree of Memphis is an ancient inscribed stone stela which comprises the second of the Ptolemaic Decrees issued by Ptolemy IV of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 305 BC to 30 BC. Like the Rosetta Stone, the Decree of Memphis is inscribed in three writing systems...
, ca. 218 BC). The Rosetta Stone is therefore no longer unique, but it was the essential key to modern understanding of
Ancient Egyptian literatureAncient Egyptian literature was written in the Egyptian language from Ancient Egypt's pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. It represents the oldest corpus of Egyptian literature...
and
civilizationAncient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
. The term
Rosetta Stone is now used in other contexts as the name for the essential clue to a new field of knowledge.
Description
The Rosetta Stone is listed as "a stone of black
graniteGranite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...
, bearing three inscriptions ... found at Rosetta", in a contemporary catalogue of the artifacts discovered by the French expedition and surrendered to British troops in 1801. At some period after its arrival in London, the inscriptions on the stone were coloured in
white chalkChalk is a soft, white, porous sedimentary rock, a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite. Calcite is calcium carbonate or CaCO3. It forms under reasonably deep marine conditions from the gradual accumulation of minute calcite plates shed from micro-organisms called coccolithophores....
to make them more legible, and the remaining surface was covered with a layer of
carnauba waxCarnauba , also called Brazil wax and palm wax, is a wax of the leaves of the palm Copernicia prunifera, a plant native to and grown only in the northeastern Brazilian states of Piauí, Ceará, and Rio Grande do Norte. It is known as "queen of waxes" and usually comes in the form of hard yellow-brown...
designed to protect the Rosetta Stone from visitors' fingers. This gave a dark colour to the stone that led to its mistaken identification as
black basaltBasalt is a common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually grey to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface of a planet. It may be porphyritic containing larger crystals in a fine matrix, or vesicular, or frothy scoria. Unweathered basalt is black or grey...
. These additions were removed when the stone was cleaned in 1999, revealing the original dark grey tint of the rock, the sparkle of its crystalline structure, and a
pink veinIn geology, a vein is a distinct sheetlike body of crystallized minerals within a rock. Veins form when mineral constituents carried by an aqueous solution within the rock mass are deposited through precipitation...
running across the top left corner. Comparisons with the
Klemm collectionThe Rosemarie and Dietrich Klemm Collection, deposited in the British Museum in London, consists of thousands of rock samples from the sites of Egyptian quarries. The collection was formed by the Egyptologist Rosemarie Klemm and the geologist Dietrich D. Klemm, both at...
of Egyptian rock samples showed a close resemblance to rock from a small
granodioriteGranodiorite is an intrusive igneous rock similar to granite, but containing more plagioclase than orthoclase-type feldspar. Officially, it is defined as a phaneritic igneous rock with greater than 20% quartz by volume where at least 65% of the feldspar is plagioclase. It usually contains abundant...
quarry at
Gebel TingarGebel Tingar is a small mountain used as a granodiorite quarry in ancient times. The site is located on the west bank of the River Nile, west of Elephantine, near Aswan...
on the west bank of the
NileThe Nile is a major north-flowing river in North Africa, generally regarded as the longest river in the world. It is long. It runs through the ten countries of Sudan, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Egypt.The Nile has two major...
, west of
ElephantineElephantine is an island in the River Nile, located just downstream of the First Cataract at the southern border of Ancient Egypt. This region is referred to as Upper Egypt because the land is higher than that near the Mediterranean coast. The island may have received its name because it was a...
in the region of
AswanAswan , formerly spelled Assuan, is a city in the south of Egypt, the capital of the Aswan Governorate.It stands on the east bank of the Nile at the first cataract and is a busy market and tourist centre...
; the pink vein is typical of granodiorite from this region.
The Rosetta Stone is now 114.4 centimetres (45 in) high at its highest point, 72.3 cm (28.5 in) wide, and 27.9 cm (11 in) thick. It weighs approximately 760 kilograms (1,675.5 lb). It bears three inscriptions: the top register in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the second in the Egyptian
demoticDemotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and...
script, and the third in Ancient Greek. The front surface is polished and the inscriptions lightly incised on it; the sides of the stone are smoothed, but the back is only roughly worked, presumably because this would have not been visible when it was erected.
Original stele
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele. No additional fragments were found in later searches of the Rosetta site. Owing to its damaged state, none of the three texts is absolutely complete. The top register composed of Egyptian hieroglyphs suffered the most damage. Only the last 14 lines of the hieroglyphic text can be seen; all of them are broken on the right side, and 12 of them on the left. The following register of demotic text has survived best: it has 32 lines, of which the first 14 are slightly damaged on the right side. The final register of Greek text contains 54 lines, of which the first 27 survive in full; the rest are increasingly fragmentary due to a diagonal break at the bottom right of the stone.
Memphis decree and its context
The stele was erected after the
coronationA coronation is a ceremony marking the formal investiture of a monarch and/or their consort with regal power, usually involving the placement of a crown upon their head and the presentation of other items of regalia...
of King
Ptolemy VPtolemy V Epiphanes , son of Ptolemy IV Philopator and Arsinoe III of Egypt, was the fifth ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty. He became ruler at the age of five, and under a series of regents the kingdom was paralyzed.-Regency infighting:Ptolemy Epiphanes was only a small boy when his father, Ptolemy...
, and was inscribed with a decree that established the divine cult of the new ruler. The decree was issued by a congress of priests who gathered at
MemphisMemphis was the ancient capital of Aneb-Hetch, the first nome of Lower Egypt. Its ruins are located near the town of Helwan, south of Cairo.According to legend related by Manetho, the city was founded by the pharaoh Menes around 3000 BC. Capital of Egypt during the Old Kingdom, it remained an...
. The date is given as "4 Xandicus" in the
Macedonian calendarThe Ancient Macedonian calendar is a lunisolar calendar that was in use in ancient Macedon in the 1st millennium BC. It consisted of 12 synodic lunar months , which needed intercalary months to stay in step with the seasons...
and "18
MeshirMeshir , also known as Amshir, is the sixth month of the Coptic calendar. It lies between February 8 and March 9 of the Gregorian calendar...
" in the
Egyptian calendarThe ancient civil Egyptian calendar had a year that was 360 days long and was divided into 12 months of 30 days each, plus five extra days at the end of the year. The months were divided into three weeks of ten days each...
, which corresponds to March 27, 196 BC. The year is stated as the ninth year of Ptolemy V's reign (equated with 197/196 BC), and it is confirmed by naming four priests who officiated in that same year:
Aëtus son of AëtusAëtus son of Aëtus was a priest in the ancient Egyptian religion under the reign of Ptolemy V...
was priest of the divine cults of
Alexander the Great and the five
PtolemiesThe Ptolemaic dynasty, was a Macedonian Greek royal family which ruled the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. Their rule lasted for 275 years, from 305 BC to 30 BC...
down to Ptolemy V himself; his three colleagues, named in turn in the inscription, led the worship of
Berenice EuergetisBerenice II was the daughter of Magas of Cyrene and Queen Apama II, and the wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, the third ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt....
(wife of
Ptolemy III-Family:Euergetes was the eldest son of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and his first wife, Arsinoe I, and came to power in 246 BC upon the death of his father.He married Berenice of Cyrene in the year corresponding to 244/243 BC; and their children were:...
),
Arsinoe PhiladelphaFor other uses see, ArsinoeArsinoë II was a Ptolemaic Greek Princess of Ancient Egypt and through marriage was of Queen Thrace, Asia Minor and Macedonia as wife of King Lysimachus and later co-ruler of Egypt with her brother-husband Ptolemy II Philadelphus For other uses see, ArsinoeArsinoë II...
(wife and sister of
Ptolemy IIPtolemy II Philadelphus was the king of Ptolemaic Egypt from 283 BCE to 246 BCE. He was the son of the founder of the Ptolemaic kingdom Ptolemy I Soter and Berenice, and was educated by Philitas of Cos...
) and
Arsinoe PhilopatorArsinoe III was Queen of Egypt . She was a daughter of Ptolemy III and Berenice II.Between late October and early November 220 BC she was married to her brother, Ptolemy IV. She took active part in the government of the country, at least in the measure that it was tolerated by the all-powerful...
, mother of Ptolemy V. However, a second date is also given in the Greek and hieroglyphic texts, corresponding to , the official anniversary of Ptolemy's coronation. The inscription in demotic conflicts with this, listing consecutive days in March for the decree and the anniversary; although it is uncertain why such discrepancies exist, it is clear that the decree was issued in 196 BC and that it was designed to re-establish the rule of the Ptolemaic kings over Egypt.
The decree was issued during a turbulent period in Egyptian history. Ptolemy V Epiphanes (reigned 204–181 BC), son of Ptolemy IV Philopator and his wife and sister Arsinoe, had become ruler at the age of five after the sudden death of both of his parents, murdered, according to contemporary sources, in a conspiracy that involved Ptolemy IV's mistress
AgathocleaAgathoclea was the favourite mistress of the Egyptian Greek Pharaoh Ptolemy IV Philopator who reigned 221 BC–205 BC; sister of Ptolemy IV’s minister Agathocles and through her father was a distant relation of the Ptolemaic dynasty....
. The conspirators effectively ruled Egypt as Ptolemy V's guardians, until, two years later, a revolt broke out under the general
TlepolemusTlepolemus was regent of Egypt in the Ptolemaic period under the reign of the boy-king Ptolemy V. He was briefly prominent at the end of the 3rd century BC; his dates of birth and death are not known....
and Agathoclea and her family were lynched by a mob in Alexandria. Tlepolemus, in turn, was replaced as guardian in 201 BC by
Aristomenes of AlyziaAristomenes of Alyzia or Aristomenes the Acarnanian was regent and chief minister of Egypt in the Ptolemaic period during the reign of the boy king Ptolemy V....
, who was chief minister at the time of the Memphis decree.
Political forces beyond the borders of Egypt exacerbated the internal problems of the Ptolemaic kingdom. Antiochus III the Great and Philip V of Macedon had made a pact to divide Egypt's overseas possessions. Philip had seized several islands and cities in
CariaCaria was a region of western Anatolia extending along the coast from mid-Ionia south to Lycia and east to Phrygia. The Ionian and Dorian Greeks colonized the west of it and joined the Carian population in forming Greek-dominated states there...
and
ThraceThrace is a historical and geographic area in southeast Europe. As a geographical concept, Thrace designates a region bounded by the Balkan Mountains on the north, Rhodope Mountains and the Aegean Sea on the south, and by the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara on the east...
, while the
Battle of PaniumThe Battle of Panium was fought in 200 BC between Seleucid and Ptolemaic forces as part of the Syrian Wars. The Seleucids were led by Antiochus III the Great, while the Ptolemaic army was led by Scopas of Aetolia. The Seleucids won the battle...
(198 BC) had resulted in the transfer of
Coele-SyriaCoele-Syria , or Cœle-Syria or Celesyria, traditionally given the meaning 'hollow' Syria, was the region of southern Syria disputed between the Seleucid dynasty and the Ptolemaic dynasty. Rather than limiting the Greek term to the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, it is often used to cover the entire area...
, including
JudeaJudea or Judæa was the name of the mountainous southern part of the historic Land of Israel from the 8th century BCE to the 2nd century CE, when Roman Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina following the Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt.-Etymology:The...
, from the Ptolemies to the Seleucids. Meanwhile, in the south of Egypt, there was a long-standing revolt that had begun during the reign of Ptolemy IV, led by
HorwenneferHugronaphor was an Upper Egyptian of apparently Nubian origin who led Upper Egypt in secession from the rule of Ptolemy IV Philopator in 205 BC...
and by his successor
AnkhwenneferAdikhalamani was a Kushite King of Meroe dating to the 2nd century BCE. Adikhalamani was the successor of King Arqamani and was later succeeded by a king whose name has only partially survived: mrt. He is said to be contemporary with an Egyptian revolt dated to ca. 207-186 BCE...
. Both the war and the internal revolt were still ongoing when the young Ptolemy V was officially crowned at Memphis at the age of 12 (seven years after the start of his reign), and the Memphis decree issued.
The stele is a late example of a class of donation stelae, which depicts the reigning monarch granting a tax exemption to the resident priesthood. Pharaohs had erected these stelae over the previous 2,000 years, the earliest examples dating from the Egyptian
Old KingdomOld Kingdom is the name given to the period in the 3rd millennium BC when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization in complexity and achievement – the first of three so-called "Kingdom" periods, which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley .The term itself was...
. In earlier periods all such decrees were issued by the king himself, but the Memphis decree was issued by the priests, as the maintainers of traditional Egyptian culture. The decree records that Ptolemy V gave a gift of silver and grain to the
templesEgyptian temples were built for the official worship of the gods and commemoration of pharaohs in Ancient Egypt and in regions under Egyptian control. These temples were seen as houses for the gods or kings to whom they were dedicated...
. It also records that in the eighth year of his reign during a particularly high
Nile floodhas been an important natal cycle in Egypt since ancient times. It is celebrated by Egyptians as an annual holiday for two weeks starting August 15, known as Wafaa El-Nil. It is also celebrated in the Coptic Church by ceremonially throwing a martyr's relic into the river, hence the name, Esba`...
, he had the excess waters dammed for the benefit of the farmers. In return for these concessions, the priesthood pledged that the king's birthday and coronation days would be celebrated annually, and that all the priests of Egypt would serve him alongside the other gods. The decree concludes with the instruction that a copy was to be placed in every temple, inscribed in the "language of the gods" (hieroglyphs), the "language of documents" (demotic), and the "language of the Greeks" as used by the Ptolemaic government.
Securing the favour of the priesthood was essential for the Ptolemaic kings to retain effective rule over the populace. The
High PriestsThe High Priest of Ptah was sometimes referred to as the Greatest of the Masters of the Craftsmen . This title refers to Ptah as the patron god of the craftsmen.The office of the High Priest of Ptah was located in Memphis...
of
MemphisMemphis was the ancient capital of Aneb-Hetch, the first nome of Lower Egypt. Its ruins are located near the town of Helwan, south of Cairo.According to legend related by Manetho, the city was founded by the pharaoh Menes around 3000 BC. Capital of Egypt during the Old Kingdom, it remained an...
—where the king was crowned—were particularly important, as they were the highest religious authority of the time and had influence throughout the kingdom. Given that the decree was issued at Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt, rather than Alexandria, the centre of government of the ruling Ptolemies, it is evident that the young king was anxious to gain their active support. Hence, although the government of Egypt had been Greek-speaking ever since the conquests of
Alexander the Great, the Memphis decree, like the
two preceding decreesThe Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 305 BC to 30 BC, issued these series of decrees over the course of their reign. The Rosetta Stone is a well-known example of one of the decrees....
in the series, included texts in Egyptian to display its relevance to the general populace by way of the literate Egyptian priesthood.
There exists no one definitive English translation of the decree because of the minor differences between the three original texts and because modern understanding of the ancient languages continues to develop. An up-to-date translation by R. S. Simpson, based on the demotic text, appears on the British Museum website. It can be compared with Edwyn R. Bevan's full translation in
The House of Ptolemy (1927), based on the Greek text with footnote comments on variations between this and the two Egyptian texts. Bevan's version, abridged, begins thus:
The stele almost certainly did not originate in the town of
RashidRosetta is a port city on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. It is located east of Alexandria, in Beheira governorate. It was founded around AD 800....
(Rosetta) where it was found, but more likely came from a temple site farther inland, possibly the royal town of
SaisSais or Sa el-Hagar was an ancient Egyptian town in the Western Nile Delta on the Canopic branch of the Nile. It was the provincial capital of Sap-Meh, the fifth nome of Lower Egypt and became the seat of power during the Twenty-fourth dynasty of Egypt and the Saite Twenty-sixth dynasty of Egypt ...
. The temple it originally came from was probably closed around AD 392 when
Eastern RomanThe Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
emperor
Theodosius ITheodosius I , also known as Theodosius the Great, was Roman Emperor from 379 to 395. Theodosius was the last emperor to rule over both the eastern and the western halves of the Roman Empire. During his reign, the Goths secured control of Illyricum after the Gothic War, establishing their homeland...
ordered the closing of all non-Christian temples of worship. At some point the original stele broke, its largest piece becoming what we now know as the Rosetta Stone. Ancient Egyptian temples were later used as quarries for new construction, and the Rosetta Stone probably was re-used in this manner. Later it was incorporated in the foundations of a fortress constructed by the
MamelukeA Mamluk was a soldier of slave origin, who were predominantly Cumans/Kipchaks The "mamluk phenomenon", as David Ayalon dubbed the creation of the specific warrior...
SultanSultan is a title with several historical meanings. Originally, it was an Arabic language abstract noun meaning "strength", "authority", "rulership", and "dictatorship", derived from the masdar سلطة , meaning "authority" or "power". Later, it came to be used as the title of certain rulers who...
QaitbayAl-Ashraf Sayf al-Din Qa'it Bay was the eighteenth Burji Mamluk Sultan of Egypt from 872-901 A.H. . He was Circassian by birth, and was purchased by the ninth sultan Barsbay before being freed by the eleventh sultan Jaqmaq...
(ca. 1416/18–1496) to defend the
Bolbitine branchThe Nile Delta is the delta formed in Northern Egypt where the Nile River spreads out and drains into the Mediterranean Sea. It is one of the world's largest river deltas—from Alexandria in the west to Port Said in the east, it covers some 240 km of Mediterranean coastline—and is a rich...
of the Nile at Rashid. There it would lie for at least another three centuries until its rediscovery.
Two other inscriptions of the Memphis decrees have been found since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone: the
Nubayrah SteleThe Nubayrah Stele is a mutilated copy of the Decree of Memphis on a limestone stele; the same decree is found upon the Rosetta Stone...
and an inscription found at the
Temple of PhilaePhilae is an island in the Nile River and the previous site of an Ancient Egyptian temple complex in southern Egypt...
. Unlike the Rosetta Stone, their hieroglyphic inscriptions were relatively intact, and though the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone had been deciphered long before the discovery of the other copies of the decree, subsequent Egyptologists including
Wallis BudgeSir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East.-Earlier life:...
used these other inscriptions to further refine the actual hieroglyphs that must have been used in the lost portions of the hieroglyphic register on the Rosetta Stone.
Rediscovery
On
NapoleonNapoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
's 1798 campaign in Egypt, the
expeditionary armyThe French Army, officially the Armée de Terre , is the land-based and largest component of the French Armed Forces.As of 2010, the army employs 123,100 regulars, 18,350 part-time reservists and 7,700 Legionnaires. All soldiers are professionals, following the suspension of conscription, voted in...
was accompanied by the
Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a corps of 167 technical experts (
savants). On 1799, as French soldiers under the command of Colonel d'Hautpoul were strengthening the defences of
Fort JulienFort Julien was a fort in Egypt, originally built by the Ottoman Empire and occupied by the French during Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt and Syria between 1798-1801. It stood on the left bank of the Nile a couple of miles north-east of Rashid on the north coast of Egypt...
, a couple of miles north-east of the Egyptian port city of Rashid, Lieutenant
Pierre-François BouchardPierre-François Bouchard was an officer in the French Army engineers.-Early life:He was born in 1771 to Pierre Bouchard and his wife Pierrette Janet de Cressia, the youngest of their four daughters and 3 sons, all born in Orgelet...
spotted a slab with inscriptions on one side that the soldiers had uncovered. He and d'Hautpoul saw at once that it might be important and informed general
Jacques-François MenouJacques-François de Menou, baron de Boussay was a French general under Napoleon I of France. Born Jacques Menou in Boussay on 3 September 1750, he died in Mestre in the Veneto on 13 August 1810...
, who happened to be at Rosetta. The find was announced to Napoleon's newly founded scientific association in Cairo, the
Institut d'ÉgypteThe Institut d’Égypte was a learned academy formed by Napoleon Bonaparte to carry out research during his Egyptian campaign.-Early work:It first met on 24 August 1798, with Gaspard Monge as president, Bonaparte himself as vice-president and Joseph Fourier and Costaz as secretaries...
, in a report by Commission member
Michel Ange LancretMichel Ange Lancret , was an engineer with the French Corps of Bridges and Roads.He was a student of the École Polytechnique in 1794, became an Engineer of Bridges and Roads in 1797, and was a savant who accompanied Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt as a member of the Commission des Sciences et des...
noting that it contained three inscriptions, the first in hieroglyphs and the third in Greek, and rightly suggesting that the three inscriptions would be versions of the same text. Lancret's report, dated 1799, was read to a meeting of the Institute soon after . Bouchard, meanwhile, transported the stone to Cairo for examination by scholars. Napoleon himself inspected what had already begun to be called
la Pierre de Rosette, the Rosetta Stone, shortly before his return to France in August 1799.
The discovery was reported in
Courrier de l'Égypte, the official newspaper of the French expedition, in September: the anonymous reporter expressed a hope that the stone might one day be the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. In 1800, three of the Commission's technical experts devised ways to make copies of the texts on the stone. One of these, the printer and gifted linguist
Jean-Joseph MarcelJean-Joseph Marcel was a French printer and engineer. He was also a savant who accompanied Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt as a member of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a corps of 167 technical experts....
, is credited as the first to recognise that the middle text, originally guessed to be
SyriacSyriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
, was, in fact, written in the Egyptian
demoticDemotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and...
script, rarely used for stone inscriptions and, therefore, seldom seen by scholars at that time. It was the artist and inventor
Nicolas-Jacques ContéNicolas-Jacques Conté was a French painter, balloonist, army officer, and inventor of the modern pencil.He was born at Saint-Céneri-près-Sées in Normandy, and distinguished himself for his mechanical genius which was of great avail to the French army in Egypt...
who found a way to use the stone itself as a
printing blockWoodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper....
; a slightly different method for reproducing the inscriptions was adopted by
Antoine GallandAntoine Galland was a publisher and printer during the French Revolution and First Empire. As a printer he joined the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a body of technical experts sent to Egypt in 1798 to aid the work of the French expeditionary force in its successful invasion...
. The prints that resulted were taken to Paris by General
Charles DuguaCharles Francis Joseph Dugua was a general of the French Revolution.He was present during Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt. Before departing for Syria, Napoleon gave Dugua to command Cairo...
. Scholars in Europe were now able to see the inscriptions and attempt to read them.
After Napoleon's departure, French troops held off British and
OttomanThe Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
attacks for a further 18 months. In March 1801, the British landed at
Aboukir BayThe Abū Qīr Bay is a spacious bay on the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt, lying between Abu Qir and the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. It contains a natural gas field, discovered in the 1970s.On August 1, 1798, Horatio Nelson fought the Battle of the Nile, often referred to as the "Battle of Aboukir Bay"...
. General
Jacques-François MenouJacques-François de Menou, baron de Boussay was a French general under Napoleon I of France. Born Jacques Menou in Boussay on 3 September 1750, he died in Mestre in the Veneto on 13 August 1810...
, who had been one of the first to see the stone in 1799, was now in command of the French expedition. His troops, including the Commission, marched north towards the Mediterranean coast to meet the enemy, transporting the stone along with other antiquities of all kinds. Defeated in battle, Menou and the remnant of his army retreated to Alexandria where they were surrounded and besieged, the stone now inside the city. He admitted defeat and surrendered on August 30.
From French to British possession
After the surrender, a dispute arose over the fate of French archaeological and scientific discoveries in Egypt, including a group of artefacts, biological specimens, notes, plans and drawings collected by the members of the commission. Menou refused to hand them over, claiming that they belonged to the Institute. British General
John Hely-HutchinsonGeneral John Hely-Hutchinson, 2nd Earl of Donoughmore GCB was an Anglo-Irish politician, hereditary peer and soldier.-Background:He was the son of John Hely-Hutchinson and the Baroness Donoughmore...
refused to relieve the city until Menou gave in. Scholars
Edward Daniel ClarkeEdward Daniel Clarke was an English naturalist, mineralogist and traveller.-Life:Edward Daniel Clarke was born at Willingdon, Sussex, and educated first at Tonbridge....
and
William Richard HamiltonWilliam Richard Hamilton, FRS, was a British antiquarian, traveller and diplomat. He was son of Rev. Anthony Hamilton, Archdeacon of Colchester and Anne, daughter of Richard Terrick, Bishop of London....
, newly arrived from England, agreed to examine the collections in Alexandria and claimed to have found many artefacts that the French had not revealed. In a letter home, Clarke said that "we found much more in their possession than was represented or imagined".
When Hutchinson claimed all materials were property of the
British CrownThe Crown is a corporation sole that in the Commonwealth realms and any provincial or state sub-divisions thereof represents the legal embodiment of governance, whether executive, legislative, or judicial...
, a French scholar,
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-HilaireÉtienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist 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 AlexandriaThe Royal Library of Alexandria, or Ancient Library of Alexandria, in Alexandria, Egypt, was the largest and most significant great library of the ancient world. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the...
—than turn them over. Clarke and Hamilton pleaded the French scholars' case and Hutchinson finally agreed that items such as natural history specimens would be the scholars' private property. Menou quickly claimed the stone, too, as his private property; had this been accepted, he would have been able to take it to France. Equally aware of the stone's unique value, General Hutchinson rejected Menou's claim. Eventually an agreement was reached, and the transfer of the objects was incorporated into the
Capitulation of AlexandriaThe Capitulation of Alexandria in August 1801 brought to an end the French expedition to Egypt.French troops, defeated by British and Ottoman forces, had retreated to Alexandria where they were besieged...
signed by representatives of the
BritishThe British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...
,
FrenchThe French Army, officially the Armée de Terre , is the land-based and largest component of the French Armed Forces.As of 2010, the army employs 123,100 regulars, 18,350 part-time reservists and 7,700 Legionnaires. All soldiers are professionals, following the suspension of conscription, voted in...
and
OttomanThe Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
forces.
How exactly the stone was transferred into British hands is not clear, as contemporary accounts differ. Colonel
Tomkyns Hilgrove TurnerGeneral Sir Hilgrove Turner GCH is best known as the officer who escorted the Rosetta Stone from Egypt to England.-Military career:...
, who was to escort it to England, claimed later that he had personally seized it from Menou and carried it away on a gun-carriage. In a much more detailed account, Edward Daniel Clarke stated that a French "officer and member of the Institute" had taken him, his student John Cripps, and Hamilton secretly into the back streets behind Menou's residence and revealed the stone hidden under protective carpets among Menou's baggage. According to Clarke, their informant feared that the stone might be stolen if French soldiers saw it. Hutchinson was informed at once and the stone was taken away—possibly by Turner and his gun-carriage.
Turner brought the stone to England aboard the captured French frigate
HMS EgyptienneÉgyptienne was a French frigate launched at Toulon in 1799. Her first service was in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1801, in which the British captured her at Alexandria. She famously carried the Rosetta Stone to Woolwich, and then the Admiralty commissioned her into the Royal Navy as the 40-gun...
, landing in
PortsmouthPortsmouth is the second largest city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire on the south coast of England. Portsmouth is notable for being the United Kingdom's only island city; it is located mainly on Portsea Island...
in February 1802. His orders were to present it and the other antiquities to King
George IIIGeorge III was King of Great Britain and King 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...
. The King, represented by the
War SecretaryThe Secretary of State for War and the Colonies was a British cabinet level position responsible for the army and the British colonies . The Department was created in 1801...
Lord HobartRobert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire PC , styled Lord Hobart from 1793 to 1804, was a British Tory politician of the late 18th and early 19th century.-Background:...
, directed that it should be placed in the
British MuseumThe British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, 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...
. According to Turner's narrative, he urged—and Hobart agreed—that before its final deposit in the museum, the stone should be presented to scholars at the
Society of Antiquaries of LondonThe Society of Antiquaries of London is a learned society "charged by its Royal Charter of 1751 with 'the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries'." It is based at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London , and is...
, of which Turner was a member. It was first seen and discussed there at a meeting on 1802.
During the course of 1802, the Society created four plaster casts of the inscriptions, which were given to the universities of
OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
,
CambridgeThe University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
and
EdinburghThe University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
and to
Trinity College DublinTrinity College, Dublin , formally known as the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, was founded in 1592 by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I as the "mother of a university", Extracts from Letters Patent of Elizabeth I, 1592: "...we...found and...
. Soon afterwards, prints of the inscriptions were made and circulated to European scholars. Before the end of 1802, the stone was transferred to the
British MuseumThe British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, 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...
, where it is located today. New inscriptions painted in white on the left and right edges of the slab stated that it was "Captured in Egypt by the
British ArmyThe British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...
in 1801" and "Presented by King George III".
The stone has been exhibited almost continuously in the British Museum since June 1802. During the middle of the 19th century, it was given the inventory number "EA 24", "EA" standing for "Egyptian Antiquities". It was part of a collection of ancient Egyptian monuments captured from the French expedition, including a
sarcophagusA sarcophagus is a funeral receptacle for a corpse, most commonly carved or cut from stone. The word "sarcophagus" comes from the Greek σαρξ sarx meaning "flesh", and φαγειν phagein meaning "to eat", hence sarkophagus means "flesh-eating"; from the phrase lithos sarkophagos...
of Nectanebo II (EA 10), the statue of a
high priest of AmunThe High Priest of Amun or First Prophet of Amun was the highest ranking priest in the priesthood of the Ancient Egyptian god Amun...
(EA 81) and a large granite fist (EA 9). The objects were soon discovered to be too heavy for the floors of
Montagu HouseMontagu House was a late 17th-century mansion in Great Russell Street in the Bloomsbury district of London, which became the first home of the British Museum....
(the original building of The British Museum), and they were transferred to a new extension that was built onto the mansion. The Rosetta Stone was transferred to the sculpture gallery in 1834 shortly after Montagu House was demolished and replaced by the building that now houses the British Museum. According to the museum's records, the Rosetta Stone is its most-visited single object and a simple image of it has been the museum's best selling postcard for several decades.
The Rosetta Stone was originally displayed at a slight angle from the horizontal, and rested within a metal cradle that was made for it, which involved shaving off very small portions of its sides to ensure that the cradle fitted securely. It originally had no protective covering, and despite the efforts of attendants to ensure that it was not touched by visitors, by 1847 it was found necessary to place it in a protective frame. Since 2004, the conserved stone has been on display in a specially built case in the centre of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. A replica of the Rosetta Stone as it would have appeared to early 19th-century visitors—without a case and free to touch—is now available in the
King's LibraryThe King's Library was one of the most important collections of books and pamphlets of the Age of Enlightenment. Assembled by George III, this scholarly library of over 65,000 volumes was subsequently given to the British nation by George IV. It was housed in a specially built gallery in the...
of the British Museum.
Toward the end of the First World War, 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 15.24 metres (50 ft) below ground level in a station of the
Postal Tube RailwayThe Post Office Railway, also known as Mail Rail, was a narrow-gauge driverless private underground railway in London built by the Post Office with assistance from the Underground Electric Railways Company of London to move mail between sorting offices...
at
Mount PleasantThe Royal Mail Mount Pleasant Sorting Office is the largest sorting office operated by Royal Mail in London, England....
near
HolbornHolborn is an area of Central London. Holborn is also the name of the area's principal east-west street, running as High Holborn from St Giles's High Street to Gray's Inn Road and then on to Holborn Viaduct...
. Other than during wartime, the Rosetta Stone has left the British Museum only once: for one month in October 1972, to be displayed alongside Champollion's
LettreLettre à M. Dacier is the founding text upon which Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were first systematically deciphered by Jean-Francois Champollion, largely on the basis of the multilingual Rosetta Stone.While visiting his brother Jacques-Joseph on September 14, 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion...
at the
LouvreThe Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
in Paris on the 150th anniversary of its publication, in October 1972. Even when the Rosetta Stone was undergoing conservation measures in 1999, the work was done in the gallery so that it could remain visible to the public.
Reading the Rosetta Stone
Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its eventual decipherment, there had been no understanding of the Ancient Egyptian language and script since shortly before the fall of the
Roman EmpireThe Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
. The usage of the hieroglyphic script had become increasingly specialised even in the later
Pharaonic periodAncient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
; by the 4th century AD, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in the year 391 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I; the last known inscription, found at
PhilaePhilae is an island in the Nile River and the previous site of an Ancient Egyptian temple complex in southern Egypt...
and known as
The Graffito of Esmet-AkhomThe Graffito of Esmet-Akhom is the latest known inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is inscribed in the temple of Philae in southern Egypt, and was written in 394 AD. It is dated to the Birthday of Osiris, year 110 , which is August 24, 394 AD....
, is dated to .
Hieroglyphs retained their pictorial appearance and classical authors emphasised this aspect, in sharp contrast to the
GreekThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
and
Roman alphabetsThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
. For example, in the 5th century the priest
HorapolloHorapollo is supposed author of a treatise on Egyptian hieroglyphs, extant in a Greek translation by one Philippus, titled Hieroglyphica, dating to about the 5th century.-Horapollo:...
wrote
Hieroglyphica, an explanation of almost 200
glyphA glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
s. Believed to be authoritative yet in many ways misleading, this and other works were a lasting impediment to the understanding of Egyptian writing. Later attempts at deciphering
hieroglyphsEgyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...
were made by Arab historians in medieval Egypt during the 9th and 10th centuries.
Dhul-Nun al-MisriDhul-Nun al-Misri was an Egyptian Sufi saint. He was considered the Patron Saint of the Physicians in the early Islamic era of Egypt, and is credited with having specialized the concept of Gnosis in Islam...
and
Ibn WahshiyyaIbn Wahshiyya was an Iraqi alchemist, agriculturalist, farm toxicologist, egyptologist and historian born at Qusayn near Kufa in Iraq.Ibn Wahshiyya was one of the first historians to be able to at least partly decipher what was written in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, by relating them to the...
were the first historians to study this ancient script, by relating them to the contemporary
Coptic languageCoptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
used by
CoptThe Copts are the native Egyptian Christians , a major ethnoreligious group in Egypt....
ic priests in their time. The study of hieroglyphs continued with fruitless attempts at decipherment by European scholars, notably
Johannes Goropius BecanusJohannes Goropius Becanus was a Dutch physician, linguist, and humanist.-Life:He was born Jan Gerartsen van Gorp in the town of Gorp, situated in the municipality of Hilvarenbeek...
in the 16th century,
Athanasius KircherAthanasius Kircher was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who published around 40 works, most notably in the fields of oriental studies, geology, and medicine...
in the 17th and Georg Zoëga in the 18th. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided critical missing information, gradually revealed by a succession of scholars, that eventually allowed Jean-François Champollion to determine the nature of this mysterious script.
Greek text
The
GreekAncient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
text on the Rosetta Stone provided the starting point. Ancient Greek was widely known to scholars, but the details of its use in the
HellenisticKoine Greek is the universal dialect of the Greek language spoken throughout post-Classical antiquity , developing from the Attic dialect, with admixture of elements especially from Ionic....
period as a government language in Ptolemaic Egypt were not familiar: large scale discoveries of Greek
papyriPapyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
were a long way in the future. Thus the earliest translations of the Greek text of the stone show the translators still struggling with the historical context and with administrative and religious jargon.
Stephen WestonThe Reverend Stephen Weston, BD, FRS, FSA was an English antiquarian, clergyman and man of letters.-Writings:Weston played major roles in the translation of the Rosetta Stone, presenting his work before the Society of Antiquaries in April 1811...
verbally presented an English translation of the Greek text at a
Society of AntiquariesThe Society of Antiquaries of London is a learned society "charged by its Royal Charter of 1751 with 'the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries'." It is based at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London , and is...
meeting in April 1802. Meanwhile, two of the lithographic copies made in Egypt had reached the
Institut de FranceThe Institut de France is a French learned society, grouping five académies, the most famous of which is the Académie française.The institute, located in Paris, manages approximately 1,000 foundations, as well as museums and chateaux open for visit. It also awards prizes and subsidies, which...
in Paris, in 1801. There, the librarian and antiquarian
Gabriel de La Porte du TheilFrancois-Jean-Gabriel de La Porte du Theil was a French historian. He played a role in the early attempts to decipher the Rosetta Stone....
set to work on a translation of the Greek. Almost immediately dispatched elsewhere on Napoleon's orders, he left his unfinished work in the hands of a colleague,
Hubert-Pascal AmeilhonHubert-Pascal Ameilhon was a French historian and librarian.He first worked at the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, the city of Paris historical library...
, who in 1803 produced the first published translations of the Greek text, in both
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
and French to ensure that they would circulate widely. At
CambridgeThe city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
,
Richard PorsonRichard Porson was an English classical scholar. He was the discoverer of Porson's Law; and the Greek typeface Porson was based on his handwriting.-Early life:...
worked on the missing lower right corner of the Greek text. He produced a skillful suggested reconstruction, which was soon being circulated by the Society of Antiquaries alongside its prints of the inscription. At
GöttingenGöttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...
at almost the same moment, the Classical historian
Christian Gottlob HeyneChristian Gottlob Heyne was a German classical scholar and archaeologist as well as long-time director of the Göttingen State and University Library.-Biography:He was born in Chemnitz, Electorate of Saxony...
, working from one of these prints, made a new Latin translation of the Greek text that was more reliable than Ameilhon's. First published in 1803, it was reprinted by the Society of Antiquaries, alongside Weston's previously unpublished English translation,
Colonel Turner'sGeneral Sir Hilgrove Turner GCH is best known as the officer who escorted the Rosetta Stone from Egypt to England.-Military career:...
narrative, and other documents, in a special issue of its journal
Archaeologia in 1811.
Demotic text
At the time of the stone's discovery, the
SwedishSwedes are a Scandinavian nation and ethnic group native to Sweden, mostly inhabiting Sweden and the other Nordic countries, with descendants living in a number of countries.-Etymology:...
diplomatA diplomat is a person appointed by a state to conduct diplomacy with another state or international organization. The main functions of diplomats revolve around the representation and protection of the interests and nationals of the sending state, as well as the promotion of information and...
and scholar
Johan David ÅkerbladJohan David Åkerblad was a Swedish diplomat and orientalist, a student of Silvestre de Sacy. Sacy's investigation of the Rosetta Stone did not give any result and Åkerblad took on his work in 1802 and managed to identify all proper names in the demotic text in just two months...
was working on a little-known script of which some examples had recently been found in Egypt, which came to be known as Demotic. He called it "cursive Coptic" because, although it had few similarities with the later
Coptic scriptThe Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language...
, he was convinced that it was used to record some form of the
Coptic languageCoptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
(the direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian). The French Orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, who had been discussing this work with Åkerblad, received in 1801 from
Jean-Antoine ChaptalJean-Antoine Claude, comte Chaptal de Chanteloup was a French chemist and statesman. He established chemical works for the manufacture of the mineral acids, soda and other substances...
, French minister of the interior, one of the early lithographic prints of the Rosetta Stone, and realised that the middle text was in this same script. He and Åkerblad set to work, both focusing on the middle text and assuming that the script was alphabetic. They attempted, by comparison with the Greek, to identify within this unknown text the points where Greek names ought to occur. In 1802, Silvestre de Sacy reported to Chaptal that he had successfully identified five names ("
Alexandros", "
AlexandreiaAlexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
", "
PtolemaiosPtolemy V Epiphanes , son of Ptolemy IV Philopator and Arsinoe III of Egypt, was the fifth ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty. He became ruler at the age of five, and under a series of regents the kingdom was paralyzed.-Regency infighting:Ptolemy Epiphanes was only a small boy when his father, Ptolemy...
", "
ArsinoeArsinoe III was Queen of Egypt . She was a daughter of Ptolemy III and Berenice II.Between late October and early November 220 BC she was married to her brother, Ptolemy IV. She took active part in the government of the country, at least in the measure that it was tolerated by the all-powerful...
" and Ptolemy's title "
Epiphanes"), while Åkerblad published an alphabet of 29 letters (more than half of which were correct) that he had identified from the Greek names in the demotic text. They could not, however, identify the remaining characters in the Demotic text, which, as is now known, included
ideographicAn ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...
and other symbols alongside the phonetic ones.
Hieroglyphic text
Silvestre de Sacy eventually gave up work on the stone, but he was to make another contribution. In 1811, prompted by discussions with a Chinese student about
Chinese scriptChinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
, Silvestre de Sacy considered a suggestion made by
Georg ZoëgaJørgen Zoëga was a Danish archaeologist and numismatist; born at Daler near Tønder, near the west coast of northern Schleswig.-Biography:...
in 1797 that the foreign names in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions might be written phonetically; he also recalled that as long ago as 1761,
Jean-Jacques BarthélemyJean-Jacques Barthélemy was a French writer and numismatist.-Early life:Barthélemy was born at Cassis, in Provence, and began his classical studies at the College of Oratory in Marseilles. He took up philosophy and theology at the Jesuits' college, and finally attended the seminary of the Lazarists...
had suggested that the characters enclosed in
cartoucheIn Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an ellipse with a horizontal line at one end, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name, coming into use during the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under Pharaoh Sneferu, replacing the earlier serekh...
s in hieroglyphic inscriptions were proper names. Thus, when Thomas Young, foreign secretary of the
Royal Society of LondonThe Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
, wrote to him about the stone in 1814, Silvestre de Sacy suggested in reply that in attempting to read the hieroglyphic text, Young might look for cartouches that ought to contain Greek names and try to identify phonetic characters in them.
Young did so, with two results that together paved the way for the final decipherment. He discovered in the hieroglyphic text the phonetic characters "
p t o l m e s" (in today's transliteration "
p t w l m y s"), that were used to write the Greek name "
Ptolemaios". He also noticed that these characters resembled the equivalent ones in the Demotic script, and went on to note as many as 80 similarities between the hieroglyphic and demotic texts on the stone, an important discovery because the two scripts were previously thought to be entirely different from one another. This led him to deduce correctly that the demotic script was only partly phonetic, also consisting of ideographic characters imitated from hieroglyphs. Young's new insights were prominent in the long article "Egypt" that he contributed to the
Encyclopædia BritannicaThe Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
in 1819. He could, however, get no further.
In 1814, Young first exchanged correspondence about the stone with
Jean-François ChampollionJean-François Champollion was a French classical scholar, philologist and orientalist, decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs....
, a teacher at
GrenobleGrenoble is a city in southeastern France, at the foot of the French Alps where the river Drac joins the Isère. Located in the Rhône-Alpes region, Grenoble is the capital of the department of Isère...
who had produced a scholarly work on ancient Egypt. Champollion, in 1822, saw copies of the brief hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions of the
Philae obeliskThe Philae obelisk was one of two obelisks found at Philae in Upper Egypt in 1815 and soon afterwards acquired by William John Bankes. He noted two inscriptions on it, one in Egyptian hieroglyphs the other in ancient Greek...
, on which
William John BankesWilliam John Bankes , the second, but first surviving son of Henry Bankes, was a notable explorer, Egyptologist and adventurer. He was a member of the Bankes family of Dorset and he had Sir Charles Barry recase Kingston Lacy in stone as it is today...
had tentatively noted the names "Ptolemaios" and "Kleopatra" in both languages. From this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters
k l e o p a t r a (in today's transliteration
). On the basis of this and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters, which appears, printed from his hand-drawn chart, in his "
Lettre à M. DacierLettre à M. Dacier is the founding text upon which Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were first systematically deciphered by Jean-Francois Champollion, largely on the basis of the multilingual Rosetta Stone.While visiting his brother Jacques-Joseph on September 14, 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion...
", addressed at the end of 1822 to
Bon-Joseph DacierBon Joseph Dacier was a French historian, philologist and translator from ancient Greek. He became a Chevalier de l'Empire , then Baron de l'Empire...
, secretary of the Paris
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-LettresThe Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres is a French learned society devoted to the humanities, founded in February 1663 as one of the five academies of the Institut de France.-History:...
and immediately published by the Académie. This "Letter" marks the real breakthrough to reading Egyptian hieroglyphs, for not only the alphabet chart and the main text, but also the postscript in which Champollion notes that similar phonetic characters seemed to occur in not only Greek names but also native Egyptian names. During 1823, he confirmed this, identifying the names of pharaohs
RamessesMenpehtyre Ramesses I was the founding Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt's 19th dynasty. The dates for his short reign are not completely known but the time-line of late 1292-1290 BC is frequently cited as well as 1295-1294 BC...
and
ThutmoseThutmose I was the third Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty of Egypt. He was given the throne after the death of the previous king Amenhotep I. During his reign, he campaigned deep into the Levant and Nubia, pushing the borders of Egypt further than ever before...
written in cartouches in far older hieroglyphic inscriptions that had been copied by Bankes at Abu Simbel and sent on to Champollion by
Jean-Nicolas HuyotJean-Nicholas Huyot was a French architect, best known for his 1823 continuation of work on the Arc de Triomphe from the plans of Jean Chalgrin....
. From this point, the stories of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs diverge, as Champollion drew on many other texts to develop a first Ancient Egyptian grammar and a hieroglyphic dictionary, both of which were to be published after his death.
Later work
Work on the stone now focused on fuller understanding of the texts and their contexts by comparing the three versions with one another. In 1824, the Classical scholar
Antoine-Jean LetronneJean Antoine Letronne was a French archaeologist.Born in Paris, his father, a poor engraver, sent him to study art under the painter David, but his own tastes were literary, and he became a student in the Collège de France, where it is said he used to exercise his already strongly developed...
promised to prepare a new literal translation of the Greek text for Champollion's use; Champollion promised in return an analysis of all the points at which the three texts seemed to differ. Following Champollion's sudden death in 1832, his draft of this analysis could not be found, and Letronne's work stalled. At the death in 1838 of
François SalvoliniFrancesco Salvolini was a scholar of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs who worked with Jean-François Champollion on deciphering hieroglyphs near the end of the latter's life...
, Champollion's former student and assistant, this and other missing drafts were found among his papers (incidentally demonstrating that Salvolini's own publication on the stone, in 1837, was
plagiarismPlagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
). Letronne was at last able to complete his commentary on the Greek text and his new French translation of it, which appeared in 1841. During the early 1850s, two German Egyptologists,
Heinrich BrugschHeinrich Karl Brugsch was a German Egyptologist, born in Berlin. He was associated with Auguste Mariette in his excavations at Memphis...
and
Max UhlemannMax Uhlemann, in full Maximilian Adolph Uhlemann was a German Egyptologist who in 1853 published the third Latin translation of the Egyptian hieroglyphic text of the Rosetta Stone inscription...
, produced revised Latin translations based on the demotic and hieroglyphic texts; the first English translation, the work of three members of the
Philomathean SocietyThe Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania is a collegiate literary society, the oldest student group at the university, and a claimant to the title of the oldest continuously-existing literary society in the United States.This claim is disputed between the Philomathean Society and...
at the
University of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, followed in 1858.
The question of whether one of the three texts was the standard version from which the other two were originally translated has remained controversial. Letronne, in 1841, attempted to show that the Greek version (that of the Egyptian government under its Ptolemaic dynasty) was the original. Among recent authors, John Ray has stated that "the hieroglyphs were the most important of the scripts on the stone: they were there for the gods to read, and the more learned of their priesthood". Philippe Derchain and Heinz Josef Thissen have argued that all three versions were composed simultaneously, while Stephen Quirke sees in the decree "an intricate coalescence of three vital textual traditions".
Richard ParkinsonRichard Bruce Parkinson is a British academic of Egyptology.Parkinson studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, his D.Phil thesis being a commentary on The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant and submitted in 1988....
points out that the hieroglyphic version, straying from archaic formalism, occasionally lapses into language closer to that of the demotic register that the priests more commonly used in everyday life. The fact that the three versions cannot be matched word for word helps to explain why its decipherment has been more difficult than originally expected, especially for those original scholars who were expecting an exact bilingual key to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Rivalries
Even before the Salvolini affair, disputes over precedence and plagiarism punctuated the
deciphermentDecipherment is the analysis of documents written in ancient languages, where the language is unknown, or knowledge of the language has been lost....
story. Thomas Young's work is acknowledged in Champollion's 1822
Lettre à M. Dacier, but incompletely, according to British critics: for example, James Browne, a sub-editor on the
Encyclopædia Britannica (which had published Young's 1819 article), contributed anonymously a series of review articles to the
Edinburgh ReviewThe Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was one of the most influential British magazines of the 19th century. It ceased publication in 1929. The magazine took its Latin motto judex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur from Publilius Syrus.In 1984, the Scottish cultural magazine New Edinburgh Review,...
in 1823, praising Young's work highly and alleging that the "unscrupulous" Champollion
plagiarisedPlagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
it. These articles were translated into French by
Julius KlaprothJulius Heinrich Klaproth , German linguist, historian, ethnographer, author, Orientalist and explorer. As a scholar, he is credited along with Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, with being instrumental in turning East Asian Studies into scientific disciplines with critical methods.-Chronology:Klaproth was...
and published in book form in 1827. Young's own 1823 publication reasserted the contribution that he had made. The early deaths of Young and Champollion, in 1829 and 1832, did not put an end to these disputes; the authoritative work on the stone by the
British MuseumThe British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, 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...
curator E. A. Wallis Budge, published in 1904, gives special emphasis to Young's contribution by contrast with Champollion's. In the early 1970s, French visitors complained that the portrait of Champollion was smaller than one of Young on an adjacent information panel; English visitors complained that the opposite was true. Both portraits were in fact the same size.
Requests for repatriation to Egypt
In July 2003, on the occasion of the British Museum's 250th anniversary, Egypt first requested the return of the Rosetta Stone.
Zahi HawassZahi Hawass is an Egyptian archaeologist, an Egyptologist, and former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs. He has also worked at archaeological sites in the Nile Delta, the Western Desert, and the Upper Nile Valley....
, the chief of
Egypt's Supreme Council of AntiquitiesThe Supreme Council of Antiquities is the branch of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture responsible for the conservation, protection and regulation of all antiquities and archaeological excavations in Egypt...
, asked that the stele be
repatriatedArt repatriation is the return of art or cultural objects, usually referring to ancient or looted art, to their country of origin or former owners . The disputed cultural property items are physical artifacts of a group or society that were taken from another group usually in an act of looting,...
to Egypt, urging in comments to reporters: "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". Two years later in Paris he repeated the proposal, listing the stone as one of several key items belonging to Egypt's cultural heritage, a list which also included the iconic bust of
NefertitiNefertiti was the Great Royal Wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. Nefertiti and her husband were known for a religious revolution, in which they started to worship one god only...
in the
Egyptian Museum of BerlinThe Egyptian Museum of Berlin is home to one of the world's most important collections of Ancient Egyptian artifacts.The collection is part of the Neues Museum.-History:...
; a statue of the
Great PyramidThe Great Pyramid of Giza is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in the Giza Necropolis bordering what is now El Giza, Egypt. It is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the only one to remain largely intact...
architect Hemiunu in the
Roemer-und-Pelizaeus-MuseumThe Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum, in Hildesheim, Germany, is one of the most important museums in Europe with regard to Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Peruvian art. The museum also includes the second largest collection of Chinese porcelain in Europe...
in
HildesheimHildesheim is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is located in the district of Hildesheim, about 30 km southeast of Hanover on the banks of the Innerste river, which is a small tributary of the Leine river...
, Germany; the
Dendara Temple ZodiacThe sculptured Dendera zodiac is a widely known Egyptian bas-relief from the ceiling of the pronaos of a chapel dedicated to Osiris in the Hathor temple at Dendera, containing images of Taurus and the Libra . This chapel was begun in the late Ptolemaic period; its pronaos was added by the...
in the
LouvreThe Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
in Paris; and the
bust of AnkhhafThe painted limestone bust of Ankhhaf is considered the work "of a master" of Ancient Egyptian art from the time of the Old Kingdom, and can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Its catalog number is Museum Expedition 27.442....
from the
Museum of Fine Arts, BostonThe Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United States, attracting over one million visitors a year. It contains over 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas...
. During 2005, the British Museum presented to Egypt a full-size replica of the stele. This was initially displayed in the renovated Rashid National Museum, close to the site where the stone was found. By November 2005, Hawass was suggesting a three-month loan of the Rosetta Stone, while reiterating the eventual goal of a permanent return; in December 2009, he proposed to drop his claim for the permanent return of the Rosetta Stone if the British Museum loaned the stone to Egypt for three months, for the opening of the
Grand Egyptian MuseumThe Grand Egyptian Museum , also known as the Giza Museum, is a planned museum of artifacts of ancient Egypt. Described as the largest archaeological museum in the world, the USD 550 million museum is scheduled to open in 2013...
at
Giza in 2013.
As
John RayProfessor John D. Ray is the current Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge. His principal field of interest covers the Late and Hellenistic periods of Egypt, with special reference to documents in the demotic script, and he is also known for deciphering the...
has observed, "the day may come when the stone has spent longer in the British Museum than it ever did in Rosetta." There is strong opposition among national museums to the repatriation of objects of international cultural significance such as the Rosetta Stone. In response to repeated Greek requests for return of the
Elgin MarblesThe Parthenon Marbles, forming a part of the collection known as the Elgin Marbles , are a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures , inscriptions and architectural members that originally were part of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens...
and similar requests to other museums around the world, in 2002, over 30 of the world's leading museums — including the
British MuseumThe British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, 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...
,
the LouvreThe Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
, the
Pergamon MuseumThe Pergamon Museum is situated on the Museum Island in Berlin. The site was designed by Alfred Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann and was constructed in twenty years, from 1910 to 1930. The Pergamon houses original-sized, reconstructed monumental buildings such as the Pergamon Altar and the Market Gate...
in Berlin and the
Metropolitan MuseumThe Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
in New York City — issued a joint statement declaring that "objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values reflective of that earlier era" and that "museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation".
Idiomatic use
The term
Rosetta stone has been used
idiomIdiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made...
atically to represent a crucial key to the process of decryption of encoded information, especially when a small but representative sample is recognised as the clue to understanding a larger whole. According to the
Oxford English DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
, the first figurative use of the term appeared in the 1902 edition of the
Encyclopædia BritannicaThe Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
relating to an entry on the chemical analysis of
glucoseGlucose is a simple sugar and an important carbohydrate in biology. Cells use it as the primary source of energy and a metabolic intermediate...
. An almost literal use of the phrase appears in popular fiction within
H. G. WellsHerbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...
' 1933 novel
The Shape of Things to ComeThe Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G. Wells, published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2106. The book is dominated by Wells's belief in a world state as the solution to mankind's problems....
, where the protagonist finds a manuscript written in
shorthandShorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphē or graphie...
that provides a key to understanding additional scattered material that is sketched out in both longhand and on
typewriterA typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
. Perhaps its most important and prominent usage in scientific literature was Nobel laureate
Theodor W. Hänsch's reference in a 1979
Scientific AmericanScientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
article on
spectroscopySpectroscopy is the study of the interaction between matter and radiated energy. Historically, spectroscopy originated through the study of visible light dispersed according to its wavelength, e.g., by a prism. Later the concept was expanded greatly to comprise any interaction with radiative...
where he says that "the spectrum of the hydrogen atoms has proved to be the Rosetta stone of modern physics: once this pattern of lines had been deciphered much else could also be understood".
Since then the term has been widely used in other contexts. For example, fully understanding the key set of genes to the human leucocyte antigen has been described as being "the Rosetta Stone of immunology". The flowering plant
Arabidopsis thalianaArabidopsis thaliana is a small flowering plant native to Europe, Asia, and northwestern Africa. A spring annual with a relatively short life cycle, arabidopsis is popular as a model organism in plant biology and genetics...
has been called the "Rosetta Stone of flowering time". A Gamma ray burst (GRB) found in conjunction with a
supernovaA supernova is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. It is pronounced with the plural supernovae or supernovas. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months...
has been called a Rosetta Stone for understanding the origin of GRBs. The technique of
Doppler echocardiographyDoppler echocardiography is a procedure which uses ultrasound technology to examine the heart. An echocardiogram uses high frequency sound waves to create an image of the heart while the use of Doppler technology allows determination the speed and direction of blood flow by utilizing the Doppler...
has been called a Rosetta Stone for clinicians trying to understand the complex process by which the
left ventricleThe left ventricle is one of four chambers in the human heart. It receives oxygenated blood from the left atrium via the mitral valve, and pumps it into the aorta via the aortic valve.-Shape:...
of the
human heartThe human heart is a muscular organ that provides a continuous blood circulation through the cardiac cycle and is one of the most vital organs in the human body...
can be filled during various forms of
diastolic dysfunctionDiastolic heart failure or diastolic dysfunction refers to decline in performance of one or both ventricles of the heart during the time phase of diastole...
.
The name has also become used in various forms of translation software.
Rosetta StoneRosetta Stone is proprietary computer-assisted language learning software developed by Rosetta Stone Inc. Both its title and logo refer to the Rosetta Stone, an artifact inscribed in multiple languages that helped Jean-François Champollion to decipher Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs...
is a brand of language-learning software published by Rosetta Stone Ltd., headquartered in
Arlington County, VirginiaArlington County is a county in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The land that became Arlington was originally donated by Virginia to the United States government to form part of the new federal capital district. On February 27, 1801, the United States Congress organized the area as a subdivision of...
, US. "
RosettaRosetta was a lightweight and dynamic binary translator for Mac OS X which Apple released in 2006 when it transitioned the Macintosh from PowerPC to Intel processors. It allowed pre-existing software to run on the new systems without modification....
" is the name of a "lightweight dynamic translator" that enables applications compiled for
PowerPCPowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
processor to run on Apple systems using an x86 processor. "Rosetta" is an online language translation tool to help localisation of software, developed and maintained by
CanonicalCanonical Ltd. is a private company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu Linux and related projects. Canonical is registered in London and employs staff around the world...
as part of the
LaunchpadLaunchpad is a web application and website that allow users to develop and maintain software, particularly free software. Launchpad is developed and maintained by Canonical Ltd....
project. Similarly,
Rosetta@homeRosetta@home is a distributed computing project for protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform, run by the Baker laboratory at the University of Washington...
is a
distributed computing projectDistributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
for predicting (or
translating) protein structures. The
Rosetta ProjectThe 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 12,000 AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500...
brings language specialists and native speakers together to develop a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages, intended to last from AD 2000 to 12,000. The Rosetta spacecraft is on a ten-year mission to study the
cometA comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are both due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind upon the nucleus of the comet...
67P/Churyumov-GerasimenkoComet Churyumov–Gerasimenko, officially designated 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, is a comet with a current orbital period of 6.6 years. It is the destination of the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft mission, launched on March 2, 2004....
, in the hopes that determining its composition will reveal the origins of the
Solar SystemThe Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...
.
Timeline of early publications about the Rosetta Stone
External links