The Rosetta Stone: Ancient Artifact, Teacher and Prisoner of War

On July 19^th 1799 while reconstructing a fort during an Egyptian campaign near Rosetta, Egypt, a young French officer Pierre-Francois Bouchard, with the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, finds a slab of black basalt. This slab of rock was inscribed with three ancient inscriptions in three different languages and has become known to the world as the Rosetta Stone.

Egypt had not been very accessible to Europeans for centuries, and as a conqueror, Napoleon thought that a conquest of Egypt would make a route to India's vast trade much easier. Napoleon was met with very little resistance when he invaded and took over the city of Cairo. He had brought with his army, linguists, antiquarians and scholars However Napoleon's team of scholars never had much of a chance to study the strange inscriptions, for the oddly inscribed stone was not long in their possession. In 1801 the British and the Turks, unhappy as the Egyptians with the French invasion, ousted Napoleon, running him out of Cairo as the Egyptian people spit on he and his soldiers. The British took possession of the Rosetta Stone and many other artifacts the French had hoarded. By 1802 the stone had been transported to London and placed in the British Museum.

The slab of basalt stone was 45.04 inches high, 28.5 inches wide, and 10.9 inches thick, it weighed 1,676 pounds and bore three different inscriptions. The top band was inscribed with the most mysterious, the Egyptian hieroglyphics. The middle inscription was in demotic, a common language of ancient Egypt, and the bottom inscription was in ancient Greek.

The earliest translation of the Greek inscription was done by Reverend Stephen Weston of London in April of 1802, for the Society of Antiquities. The French linguist Silvestre de Sacy, meanwhile was working with Thomas Young, a physician, physicist and Egyptologist, they were the first to crack part of the mystery, Young managed to identify the words "Ptolemy" and "Alexander" from the demotic inscription. A Swedish diplomat with a knowledge of the ancient Coptic language, Johann Akarblad, identified the words "love", "temple" and "Greek", in the demotic text. After several years of study, Thomas and de Sacy determined that some of the symbols were proper names and 5 of them were deciphered. Together de Sacy and Thomas compiled a demotic alphabet with 29 characters, and Young translated the complete demotic text of the Rosetta Stone by 1814. His studies were published in 1823 "Account of Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphic Literature and Egyptian Antiquities."

Jean-Francois Champollion, beginning in 1807 worked for 2 years with de Sacy familiarizing himself with the stone. Champollion later compiled a Coptic dictionary. He worked and learned from Thomas Young and read Young's published work. It was Champollion who managed to find mistakes in previous study and he went on to decipher different hieroglyphics from around the world, and then the Rosetta Stone itself. It is purported that when finally done translating, Champollion shouted "I've done it!" And passed out for five full days. Champollion is accredited with having resurrected the language of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

So what was so interesting about that stone? What did it say? The full translation is approximately 20 paragraphs long, however in summary, the Rosetta Stone is a Royal Decree. A decree of honor. In 196 B.C.E. a group of priests of Memphis in ancient Egypt wrote the decree to honor Ptolemy V. The decree indicates that Ptolemy V took many measures to turn around the oppression being felt by the people of Egypt when he came into power. Oppression that had been caused by many things including civil war, crop failure and neglect of past irrigation practices. A festival was decreed in Ptolemy V's honor as a gesture of gratitude by the people, and the decree it was declared would be preserved on hard stone, in three different languages to honor him.

The gratitude of a people, etched in stone. A life preserver of sorts for a language of pictures, long dead to the world, that now lives again. The Rosetta Stone is still on display in the British Museum in London. In July of 2003, Dr. Zahi Hawass the Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities asked that the Rosetta Stone be returned to Egypt. A "Grand Museum" near the pyramids of Giza is planned to house Egypt's many national treasures, including the Rosetta Stone. Considering that the Rosetta Stone was the catalyst in resurrecting an understanding of ancient Egypt's hieroglyphics, it is no wonder that the Egyptian people might want it back. In the Dr. Hawass's own words, "that stone made everything in ancient Egypt alive!"

In 2005, evidently having no intention of returning the stone to Egypt, the British Museum sent him a replica.

Sources:

The History Channel

"Ancient Peoples: A Hypertext View" Author Richard A. Roetzel, 1997

Wikipedia.com

ABC.net

Encarta MSN.com