The Rosetta Stone unlocked the world's greatest mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics by providing the key.The stone was discovered by French soldiers in 1799, at Rosetta near Rashid, about 200km north of Cairo on the Mediterranean coast. The translation took two decades.
Thomas Young of England and Jean-Francois Champollion of France are credited with deciphering the stone. When the French surrendered to the English in Egypt two years after finding the stone, it became English property. The Rosetta Stone led to the modern understanding of hieroglyphs. It is a large fragment of a stela, which was placed in a temple of Ptolemy. Written in three versions: hieroglyphs, an Egyptian script called 'demotic' and finally in Greek. Made in Egypt around 200BC, it is a stone tablet engraved with writing which celebrates the crowning of King Ptolemy V. It is a solid piece of black Basalt and is 1m high by 70cm wide by 30cm deep. The interesting thing about the Rosetta Stone is that the writing is repeated three times in different alphabets:
Hieroglyphic: (top of stone) used by ancient Egyptians
Demotic: (centre of stone) used by Arabs including modern Egyptians
Greek: (base of stone) used by Greeks, and other eastern Europeans
Richard Parkinson, who organized an exhibition at the British Museum to celebrate the bicentenary discovery of the stone, said traces of pink pigment were found in the symbols on the stone. Specialists haven't determined whether the pigment is ancient or were used by the French scholars who first worked on the stone.
Although they were unsure of the stela's placement in the temple, Parkinson noted that, there are indications it was against a mud wall in the outer part of the building.
The significance of that question has to do with who was intended to read the stone -- an elite which had access to the inner temple or a wider audience. If the pigment proves to be ancient, that also would support the notion the stone was inside the temple, because the pigment would make the inscription visible in low light.
Questions also remain whether the inscription was written first in Egyptian or in Greek. "Most people now agree it was composed simultaneously -- at a sort of fractious committee meeting of courtiers and priests," Parkinson said.
According to cryptanalyst Whitfield Diffie and Egyptologist Mary Fischer:
"The decipherment of the Egyptian scripts is not a single event that occurred in 1822, when a code was cracked but is a continuous process that is repeated at every reading of a text or artifact. Such study is the closest one can come to speaking with the dead. Like any act of reading, it is a process of dialogue. The decipherment of the Rosetta Stone and of ancient Egypt is a dialogue that has scarcely begun."
Here is a portion of the writing on the Rosetta Stone:
...whereas king PTOLEMY THE EVER-LIVING, THE BELOVED OF PTAH, THE GOD EPIPHANES EUCHARISTO, the son of King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoe, the Gods Philopatores, has been a benefactor both to the temples and to those who dwell in them, as well as those who are his subjects, being a god sprung from a god and goddess (like Horus the son of lsis and Osiris, who avenged his father Osiris) and being benevolently disposed towards the gods, has dedicated to the temples revenues in money and corn and has undertaken much outlay to bring Egypt into prosperity, and to establish the temples, and has been generous with all his own means; and of the revenues and taxes levied in Egypt some he has wholly remitted and others has lightened, in order that the people and the others might be in prosperity during his reign: and whereas he has remitted the debts to the crown being many in number which they in Egypt and in the rest of the kingdom owed: and whereas those who were in prison and those who were under accusation for a long time, he has freed of the charges against them; and whereas he has directed that the gods shall continue to enjoy the revenues of the temples and the yearly allowances given to them, both of corn and money, likewise also the revenues assigned to the gods from vine land and from gardens and other properties which belonged to the gods in his father's time...
The Rosetta Stone now rests in the British Museum in London.