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Young, the elder by seventeen years, made incredible progress with both the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts, but it was Champollion who led the final breakthrough. These developments set the stage for the now infamous rivalry between Thomas Young (1773–1829) and Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) in the race to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The starting point for these efforts was using the personal names of the kings and queens mentioned in the Greek inscription and trying to match their sounds to characters in the Egyptian versions. Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), a French philologist, and his Swedish student Johan David Åkerblad (1763–1819), managed to identify the phonetic values for many of the so-called “alphabetic” signs, to read the personal names, and to determine the translation for a smattering of other words. Although popular imagination connects the Rosetta Stone most immediately to the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, the first significant steps toward decipherment focused on the demotic inscription since it was the best preserved of the Egyptian versions. “Rosetta Stone” is so ubiquitous in 21st-century global culture that future generations may one day use the phrase without understanding its origin in the chance discovery of a remarkable looking rock in Egypt.Īs scholars embarked on serious attempts to decode the Egyptian scripts with the help of the Greek translation, the trilingual nature of the inscription on the Rosetta Stone set off a decipherment frenzy in Europe. The business community has eagerly capitalized on this popularity, best represented by the adoption of the moniker for a successful language-learning software. 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. As such, some individuals have framed the “export” of the Rosetta Stone as a colonial “theft” that should be assuaged through repatriation to the modern Egyptian state. For many groups of Egyptians, the stone has been regarded as an emblem of a shared cultural and national heritage. This historical context is crucial for understanding how various communities have shaped the meaning of the Rosetta Stone.įor Napoleon’s soldiers who discovered the stone, as well as for the British soldiers who confiscated it after the French defeat, the stone represented political hegemony and scientific discovery.
#EGYPTIAN SCRIBE LANGUAGE REGISTRATION#
There, under registration number BM EA 24, it has remained on almost continuous display. The stone was officially turned over to the British in the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801, then accessioned into the British Museum in 1802. Repression of independent development by European powers led to mass protest, widespread resistance and periodic revolt, frequently mobilized around nationalist sentiments among the predominantly Islamic and Coptic populations. Napoleon’s invasion in 1798, and his subsequent defeat by British and Ottoman forces in 1801, led Egypt into a century often characterized by exploitation. The stone itself still bears the marks of these conflicts as texts painted on its sides declare “captured in Egypt by the British army 1801” and “presented by king George III.” Egypt, at the time part of the Ottoman empire, found itself pinned between competing political powers.
Its current residence in the British Museum is a legacy of the imperial ambitions of France and England in their struggle to establish, maintain and extend colonial empires in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Since initially unearthed, the Rosetta Stone has become an international icon whose kaleidoscopic symbolism has been appropriated by diverse groups over the last two centuries. This guess was corroborated upon translating the Greek description of how the stela’s text was to be promulgated: “This decree shall be inscribed on a stela of hard stone in sacred (hieroglyphic), native (Demotic), and Greek characters.” Thus, the Rosetta Stone (in French “the stone of Rosetta”) was named after the city where it was discovered. He immediately recognized the significance of the juxtaposed Greek and hieroglyphic scripts, predicting correctly that each script represented a translation of a single text. Napoleon’s forces were constructing fortifications when the large inscribed stone fragment was uncovered by officer Pierre François Xavier Bouchard (1772–1832). Rosetta was located on a tributary of the Nile near the Mediterranean coast east of Alexandria. In July 1799, the stone was found in the city of Rosetta (modern el Rashid) by French soldiers during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. The Rosetta Stone, a symbol for different things to different people, is a dark-colored granodiorite stela inscribed with the same text in three scripts – Demotic, hieroglyphic and Greek.
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