He The Rosetta Stone

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Glossary

WORDS AND PHRASES DEFINITION Image

hieroglyphic scripts Simple line drawings of

flora and fauna and things
representing Egyptian
words. There are about
800 hieroglyphs but only a
few hundred are used in
common writing.
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demotic scripts a cursive and highly

abbreviated form of
hieroglyphs used only on
papyrus, never on stone
carvings

Dynasty A dynasty is a sequence of rulers from the same family, usually in the
context of a monarchical system, but sometimes also appearing in
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republics. A dynasty may also be referred to as a "house", "family" or

"clan", among others.

a line of hereditary rulers of a country.

Decipher convert (a text written in code, or a coded signal) into normal

language.

INTRODUCTION
The Rosetta Stone is a stele of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in 196
BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes.

Words Its Definitions and Meanings

Stele
A stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the
ancient world as a monument.

Granodiorite
a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the
ancient world as a monument.

Decree An official order issued by legal authority

Ptolemaic Dynasty an ancient dynasty of Macedonian kings who ruled Egypt from
323 BC to 30 BC; founded by Ptolemy I and ended with
Cleopatra
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Ptolemaic Kingdom

. King Ptolemy V Epiphanes.

Ptolemy V Epiphanes was the fifth ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty.

He was the son of Ptolemy IV Philopator and Arsinoe III. He became
king after his father's death, when he was only five years old. After
his father's death, his mother was eager to become the next regent.

The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptianusing hieroglyphic

and Demotic scripts, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient
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Greek. The decree has only minor differences across the three
versions, making the Rosetta Stone key to deciphering the Egyptian
scripts.

Inscribing the Rosetta stone

When the Rosetta Stone was inscribed, it wasn’t a singular object; rather it was one of many of its type.

Its text praising the divine virtues of the pharaoh Ptolemy V (crowned in 196 BCE) was spread across

Egypt through the erection of similar stelae (stelae, sing. stele or stela, were upright stones upon which

commemorative or declaratory texts and images were inscribed). These particular stelae were raised

during a tumultuous moment of uprisings against the Ptolemaic Kingdom, which, though its rulers were

portrayed in Egyptian-style dress on their monuments, was governed by Greeks who imposed their

Hellenistic beliefs and systems upon their subjects.

Where was the Rosetta Stone found?

It was found in a town called Rosetta (also known as Rashid) in the Nile Delta, which
is where it got its name.

Who found it?

The stone was discovered by French soldiers on 15th July 1799. At this time,
Napoleon Bonaparte was campaigning through Egypt to gain power & influence.
Some of his soldiers discovered the Rosetta Stone accidently whilst digging
foundations to build an extension onto a fort. Luckily, Pierre-François Bouchard, the
officer in charge, recognised its importance and kept the stone safe.

Why was the stone so important?

Although the decree from the priests about Ptolemy V is interesting, its not exactly
ground-breaking. What made the Rosetta Stone one of the most important
discoveries of all time was that the priest's decree was written in three different forms
of writing (or "scripts").
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Languages in the Rosetta Stone

The inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone are in two languages, Egyptian

and Greek, and three writing systems, hieroglyphics, demotic script (a
cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphics), and the Greek alphabet, which
provided a key to the translation of the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
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The reason for the existence of three texts stems from the legacy of one
of the generals of Alexander the Great, as the Greek text on the stone is
related to the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt founded by Ptolemy I Soter. Soter was
a Macedonian Greek-speaking general from the family of Alexander.
Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 BC and Ptolemy I Soter took over the

country 9 years later after Alexander's death, while Cleopatra, who died in 30 BC,

was the last active female ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty.

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The Rosetta Stone was revealed by the French expedition in 1799 during

the construction of a fort in the town of Rosetta. The stone was not complete. It

was a broken part of a larger slab, but although it was missing a large part of the

hieroglyphs from the long lost upper section, the stone has the same messages

carved into it in ancient Greek writing; Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Egyptian

demotic script, which was a connecting script used by the ancient Egyptians

between the 7th century BC, and the 5th century AD, according to Britannica.

"The Egyptian Demotic script was the contemporary language used in

everyday speech as well as administrative documents," Foy Scalf, head of

research archives and research associate at the University of Chicago's Oriental

Institute, told Live Science.

On the other hand, the “hieroglyphic grammar mimics the Middle

Egyptian language,” which is the stage of the Egyptian language

associated with the Middle Kingdom period in Egypt. It spanned from about

2044 BC until 1650 BC.

By the Ptolemaic period, Middle Egyptian was often used for very

formal inscriptions, as Egyptian scribes considered it a classic version of their

language whose tradition bestowed authority on the text.

Ancient Greek grew to become widely used in ancient Egypt among

the literate class during the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Modern scholars were still

trying to understand it at the time of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. As such,
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the stone helped researchers decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs and Demotic script,

two different scripts of the same language.

The use of hieroglyphs began to disappear after the Romans took

over Egypt in 30 BC with the appearance of the last known Egyptian

hieroglyphic writing in the fourth century AD, as indicated by Britannica.

Further Understanding of the Rosetta Stone

1. How was it made?

The Rosetta Stone was made out of granodiorite, a type of rock

common in the Egyptian desert. It was carved using the
traditional stone-carving tools at the time: hammers and chisels
of various sizes.

2. When was it created ?

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger slab erected at an

Egyptian temple in 196 B.C.E.

3. Who Created it

During the reign of Ptolemy V, a Ptolemaic king of

Macedonian Greek ancestry.

4. What was the purpose of it

Its surface is inscribed with a decree issued by a council of

Egyptian priests on the anniversary of Ptolemy's coronation.
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Journey to the British Museum:

By the time of Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt in 1798, hieroglyphs were impenetrable, with

researchers unsure if they operated like pictograms or phonetic symbols. The exact story of the Rosetta

Stone’s rediscovery is a little ambiguous, but it’s largely held that on July 15, 1799, French soldiers

excavating for work on a fort near the port city of Rosetta (today’s Rashid) on the Nile delta found the

fragmented slab. Because ancient Greek was still a known language in the late eighteenth century, the

trilingual text spurred excitement about the possibility of interpreting the inscribed hieroglyphs.

The stone was only briefly in French hands; as a spoil of war, it was transferred to the British after the

defeat of Napoleon and the signing of the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801. Historian David Gilks notes that in

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British and French paid little attention to “international norms”

for the objects they spirited out of the Ottoman territories (see: the Parthenon marbles).

“The implicit rhetorical justification in France during Bonaparte’s expedition was that gathering study

materials was part of a broader civilizing mission to regenerate Egypt by restoring the land to its ancient

greatness under the Pharaohs,” he explains.

In 1802, the stele was moved to the British Museum, where it’s been ever since

Decoding the Rosetta Stone

When was it decoded? Who decoded it? Where and when was it
presented
Two-hundred years ago, French scholar and polymath Jean-François Champollion announced he had
deciphered the Rosetta Stone. His September 27, 1822, presentation to the Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres in Paris
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Second Decoder of the Rosetta Stone

An English historian called Thomas Young used his knowledge of the Greek language
to find translations of names, such as Ptolomy, in the hieroglyphs. Following Young's
discovery, a French historian, Jean-Francois Champollion, used the Coptic language (a
later stage of the Egyptian language, similar to that written on the stone) to decipher
much of the rest of the hieroglyphic script. It is because of the hard work of these early
Egyptologists that we can now understand Egyptian hieroglyphs. You can even learn to
write in Egyptian hieroglyphs here.

What does the Rosetta Stone Tell us?

Form of propaganda:

The Rosetta Stone was a form of propaganda, then. The inscription, written in three languages—formal hieroglyphs, demotic (the “everyday” Egyptian

script), and ancient Greek—declared that its readers must hail Ptolemy V, “the god who maketh himself manifest, whose deeds are beautiful.”

Archaeologist Jason Urbanus observes that the “tripartite inscription can be understood to have been designed by the Ptolemaic regime to ensure that

the diverse populations of ancient Egypt would be able to read and understand its message extolling the sovereignty and legitimacy of the Greek

pharaoh.”

Carved in granodiorite—stone that likely “originated from Ptolemaic quarrying sites to the south of Aswan, where dark-colored rocks such as this,

sometimes cut by veins of pink granite, are to be found,” according to researchers Andrew Middleton and Dietrich Klemm—the stele was left unfinished

on the side that probably wasn’t intended to be seen by readers. The stele later broke, but it was sturdy enough that much of the message remained

intact. The repetition of the king’s name in three languages would make it a watershed discovery for understanding not just the era of Ptolemy V but of

all of ancient Egypt.

As historian Jennifer Westerfeld writes, the Roman occupation that followed Greek rule led to a further decline of hieroglyphic writing, such that the

“last known hieroglyphic inscription, a graffito from the temple of Isis at Philae, was produced in 394 CE. By that time, the graffiti writer, a priestly scribe

named Smet, was one of the very few individuals who possessed any knowledge whatsoever of the hieroglyphic script, and by the early fifth century

that knowledge would be effectively extinct.”

What can we learn from these three scripts?

Historians used the three scripts on the Rosetta Stone to learn to read and understand hieroglyphs for the first time. Hieroglyphs had fallen out of use
around the 4th Century AD and knowledge of how to read them had disappeared as time passed. Luckily, having the same message translated into
three different scripts meant that historians could learn to translate the hieroglyphic text.
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How does the Rosetta Stone AFFECT us in the modern world?

In itself, the Rosetta Stone is no more remarkable than the other stelae of its time. But
its preservation helps us to understand Egypt's past as well as shifting powers during
the Greco-Roman period when Egypt was ruled by the Macedonians, Ptolemies and the
Romans

When it was discovered, nobody knew how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Because the inscriptions say the same thing in three different scripts, and scholars could
still read Ancient Greek, the Rosetta Stone became a valuable key to deciphering the
hieroglyphs.

Its critical role in deciphering ancient Egyptian scripts has led to the proliferation of the
term “Rosetta Stone” as a generic reference to anything that decodes ciphers or reveals
hidden mysteries.