The use of hieroglyphics died out after the 4th century and the writing system became an enigma to scholars, making the stone an essential tool in helping researchers understand the long-forgotten language. It wasn't until the 19th century—two thousand years after its creation—that the Rosetta Stone helped scholars at long last crack the code of hieroglyphics. The artifact was originally displayed in a temple, possibly near the ancient town of Sais, then centuries later moved to Rosetta and used in the construction of Fort Julien, where it was eventually uncovered by the French.
The Rosetta Stone came into the possession of the British after they defeated the French in Egypt in Young surmised that the cartouches—hieroglyphs enclosed in ovals—contained the phonetic spellings of royal names, including Ptolemy, who was referenced in the Greek inscription. In , he was able to correctly read the name of several rulers.
Soon he was able to identify other names in other texts and then, using the symbols for sounds he gleaned from those translations, to identify a word in hieroglyphics that was not a name. When Champollion announced his breakthrough, his discovery came under attack from the British, who dismissed his notion that the Egyptians had developed a phonetic-based form of writing.
The French scholar could not enjoy this vindication, however. He had died in You can subscribe to these posts via RSS or receive them by email.
Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities. It says that the priests of a temple in Memphis in Egypt supported the king. The Rosetta Stone is one of these copies, so not particularly important in its own right. Detail of the hieroglyphs, including a cartouche featuring the name Ptolemy written right to left, along with an Egyptian honorific.
Detail of the Ancient Greek section. The importance of this to Egyptology is immense. 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. Napoleon Bonaparte campaigned in Egypt from to , with the intention of dominating the East Mediterranean and threatening the British hold on India.
They discovered the Rosetta Stone on 15 July while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of Rashid Rosetta in the Nile Delta. It had apparently been built into a very old wall. The city of Rosetta around the time the Rosetta Stone was found. Hand-coloured aquatint etching by Thomas Milton after Luigi Mayer , — The stone was shipped to England and arrived in Portsmouth in February Soon after the end of the 4th century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared.
In the early years of the 19th century, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young — , an English physicist, was one of the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy.
The stone dates to B. Discover is a noble word -- the stone was part of a wall in a fort! Despite being an Egyptian artifact, and despite the fact that it was recovered and ultimately translated by the French, the Rosetta stone currently resides in the British Museum , as it has done since The importance of the Rosetta stone can't be overstated: It enabled the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics, a skill which had been lost for more than a thousand years.
It is a stele, or commemorative slab, announcing a cult of Ptolemy V , who was to be seen as divine. Such an announcement would have been politically necessary for the year-old Ptolemy, who had already been ruler for 8 years following the death of his parents at the hand of his father's mistress. The child-king oversaw a land plagued with enemies without and within, and the decree was an attempt on the part of priests and the king to restore stability. What was so helpful, from a translator's perspective, about the Rosetta stone was the fact that the decree was written on the stele three times: in hieroglyphics the formal communication medium of the priests , Egyptian demotic script the everyday notation used by most of those who could read and write , and Greek used by the administrative apparatus of Egypt during the Ptolemaic dynasty.
There were, in effect, two key breakthroughs in the translation of the Rosetta stone. The first was by an English polymath, Thomas "Phenomenon" Young , famous for such other discoveries as the wave properties of light, Young's modulus, and numerous other researches in optics, engineering and medicine.
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