The Rosetta Stone is a
granodiorite stele inscribed with three versions of a decree issued
in Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of
King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient
Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts respectively, while
the bottom is in Ancient Greek. The decree has only minor differences
between the three versions, making the Rosetta Stone key to
deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The stone was carved during the
Hellenistic period and is believed to have originally been displayed
within a temple, possibly at nearby Sais. It was probably moved in
late antiquity or during the Mameluk period, and was eventually used
as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town
of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was discovered there in
July 1799 by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard during the
Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. It was the first Ancient Egyptian
bilingual text recovered in modern times, and it aroused widespread
public interest with its potential to decipher this previously
untranslated hieroglyphic script. Lithographic copies and plaster
casts soon began circulating among European museums and scholars.
When the British defeated the French they took the stone to London
under the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. It has been on public
display at the British Museum almost continuously since 1802 and is
the most visited object there.
Study of the decree was already
underway when the first complete translation of the Greek text was
published in 1803. Jean-François Champollion announced the
transliteration of the Egyptian scripts in Paris in 1822; it took
longer still before scholars were able to read Ancient Egyptian
inscriptions and literature confidently. Major advances in the
decoding were recognition that the stone offered three versions of
the same text (1799); that the demotic text used phonetic characters
to spell foreign names (1802); that the hieroglyphic text did so as
well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic (1814); and that
phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words
(1822–1824).
Three other fragmentary copies of the
same decree were discovered later, and several similar Egyptian
bilingual or trilingual inscriptions are now known, including three
slightly earlier Ptolemaic decrees: the Decree of Alexandria in 243
BC, the Decree of Canopus in 238 BC, and the Memphis decree of
Ptolemy IV, c. 218 BC. The Rosetta Stone is no longer unique, but it
was the essential key to the modern understanding of ancient Egyptian
literature and civilization. The term Rosetta Stone is now used to
refer to the essential clue to a new field of knowledge.
Description
The Rosetta Stone is listed as "a
stone of black granodiorite, bearing three inscriptions ... found at
Rosetta" in a contemporary catalogue of the artefacts
discovered by the French expedition and surrendered to British troops
in 1801. At some period after its arrival in London, the
inscriptions were colored in white chalk to make them more legible,
and the remaining surface was covered with a layer of carnauba wax
designed to protect it from visitors' fingers. This gave a dark color
to the stone that led to its mistaken identification as black basalt.
These additions were removed when the stone was cleaned in 1999,
revealing the original dark grey tint of the rock, the sparkle of its
crystalline structure, and a pink vein running across the top left
corner. Comparisons with the Klemm collection of Egyptian rock
samples showed a close resemblance to rock from a small granodiorite
quarry at Gebel Tingar on the west bank of the Nile, west of
Elephantine in the region of Aswan; the pink vein is typical of
granodiorite from this region.
The Rosetta Stone is 1,123 millimeters
(3 ft 8 in) high at its highest point, 757 mm (2 ft 5.8 in) wide, and
284 mm (11 in) thick. It weighs approximately 760 kilograms (1,680
lb). It bears three inscriptions: the top register in Ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphs, the second in the Egyptian demotic script, and
the third in Ancient Greek. The front surface is polished and the
inscriptions lightly incised on it; the sides of the stone are
smoothed, but the back is only roughly worked, presumably because
this would have not been visible when it was erected.
Original stele
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a
larger stele. No additional fragments were found in later searches of
the Rosetta site. Owing to its damaged state, none of the three
texts is complete. The top register, composed of Egyptian
hieroglyphs, suffered the most damage. Only the last 14 lines of the
hieroglyphic text can be seen; all of them are broken on the right
side, and 12 of them on the left. Below it, the middle register of
demotic text has survived best; it has 32 lines, of which the first
14 are slightly damaged on the right side. The bottom register of
Greek text contains 54 lines, of which the first 27 survive in full;
the rest are increasingly fragmentary due to a diagonal break at the
bottom right of the stone.
The full length of the hieroglyphic
text and the total size of the original stele, of which the Rosetta
Stone is a fragment, can be estimated based on comparable stelae that
have survived, including other copies of the same order. The slightly
earlier decree of Canopus, erected in 238 BC during the reign of
Ptolemy III, is 2,190 millimeters high (7.19 ft) and 820 mm (32 in)
wide, and contains 36 lines of hieroglyphic text, 73 of demotic text,
and 74 of Greek. The texts are of similar length. From such
comparisons, it can be estimated that an additional 14 or 15 lines of
hieroglyphic inscription are missing from the top register of the
Rosetta Stone, amounting to another 300 millimeters (12 in). In
addition to the inscriptions, there would probably have been a scene
depicting the king being presented to the gods, topped with a winged
disc, as on the Canopus Stele. These parallels, and a hieroglyphic
sign for "stela" on the stone itself'
O26
The stele was erected after the
coronation of King Ptolemy V and was inscribed with a decree that
established the divine cult of the new ruler. The decree was issued
by a congress of priests who gathered at Memphis. The date is given
as "4 Xandikos" in the Macedonian calendar and "18
Mekhir" in the Egyptian calendar, which corresponds to 27
March 196 BC. The year is stated as the ninth year of Ptolemy V's
reign (equated with 197/196 BC), which is confirmed by naming four
priests who officiated in that year: Aetos son of Aetos was priest of
the divine cults of Alexander the Great and the five Ptolemies down
to Ptolemy V himself; the other three priests named in turn in the
inscription are those who led the worship of Berenice Euergetis (wife
of Ptolemy III), Arsinoe Philadelphos (wife and sister of Ptolemy
II), and Arsinoe Philopator, mother of Ptolemy V. However, a second
date is also given in the Greek and hieroglyphic texts, corresponding
to 27 November 197 BC, the official anniversary of Ptolemy's
coronation. The demotic text conflicts with this, listing
consecutive days in March for the decree and the anniversary. It is
uncertain why this discrepancy exists, but it is clear that the
decree was issued in 196 BC and that it was designed to re-establish
the rule of the Ptolemaic kings over Egypt.
The decree was issued during a
turbulent period in Egyptian history. Ptolemy V Epiphanes reigned
from 204 to 181 BC, the son of Ptolemy IV Philopator and his wife and
sister Arsinoe. He had become ruler at the age of five after the
sudden death of both of his parents, who were murdered in a
conspiracy that involved Ptolemy IV's mistress Agathoclea, according
to contemporary sources. The conspirators effectively ruled Egypt as
Ptolemy V's guardians until a revolt broke out two years later under
general Tlepolemus, when Agathoclea and her family were lynched by a
mob in Alexandria. Tlepolemus, in turn, was replaced as guardian in
201 BC by Aristomenes of Alyzia, who was chief minister at the time
of the Memphis decree.
Political forces beyond the borders of
Egypt exacerbated the internal problems of the Ptolemaic kingdom.
Antiochus III the Great and Philip V of Macedon had made a pact to
divide Egypt's overseas possessions. Philip had seized several
islands and cities in Caria and Thrace, while the Battle of Panium
(198 BC) had resulted in the transfer of Coele-Syria, including
Judaea, from the Ptolemies to the Seleucids. Meanwhile, in the south
of Egypt, there was a long-standing revolt that had begun during the
reign of Ptolemy IV, led by Horwennefer and by his successor
Ankhwennefer. Both the war and the internal revolt were still
ongoing when the young Ptolemy V was officially crowned at Memphis at
the age of 12 (seven years after the start of his reign) and when,
just over a year later, the Memphis decree was issued.
Stelae of this kind, which were
established on the initiative of the temples rather than that of the
king, are unique to Ptolemaic Egypt. In the preceding Pharaonic
period it would have been unheard of for anyone but the divine rulers
themselves to make national decisions: by contrast, this way of
honoring a king was a feature of Greek cities. Rather than making his
eulogy himself, the king had himself glorified and deified by his
subjects or representative groups of his subjects. The decree
records that Ptolemy V gave a gift of silver and grain to the
temples. It also records that there was particularly high flooding
of the Nile in the eighth year of his reign, and he had the excess
waters dammed for the benefit of the farmers. In return the
priesthood pledged that the king's birthday and coronation days would
be celebrated annually and that all the priests of Egypt would serve
him alongside the other gods. The decree concludes with the
instruction that a copy was to be placed in every temple, inscribed
in the "language of the gods" (Egyptian
hieroglyphs), the "language of documents" (Demotic),
and the "language of the Greeks" as used by the
Ptolemaic government.
Securing the favour of the priesthood
was essential for the Ptolemaic kings to retain effective rule over
the populace. The High Priests of Memphis—where the king was
crowned—were particularly important, as they were the highest
religious authorities of the time and had influence throughout the
kingdom. Given that the decree was issued at Memphis, the ancient
capital of Egypt, rather than Alexandria, the center of government of
the ruling Ptolemies, it is evident that the young king was anxious
to gain their active support. Thus, although the government of Egypt
had been Greek-speaking ever since the conquests of Alexander the
Great, the Memphis decree, like the three similar earlier decrees,
included texts in Egyptian to show its connection to the general
populace by way of the literate Egyptian priesthood.
There can be no one definitive English
translation of the decree, not only because modern understanding of
the ancient languages continues to develop, but also because of the
minor differences between the three original texts. Older
translations by E. A. Wallis Budge (1904, 1913) and Edwyn R. Bevan
(1927) are easily available but are now outdated, as can be seen by
comparing them with the recent translation by R. S. Simpson, which is
based on the demotic text and can be found online, or, best of all,
with the modern translations of all three texts, with introduction
and facsimile drawing, that were published by Quirke and Andrews in
1989.
The stele was almost certainly not
originally placed at Rashid (Rosetta) where it was found, but more
likely came from a temple site farther inland, possibly the royal
town of Sais. The temple from which it originally came was probably
closed around AD 392 when Roman emperor Theodosius I ordered the
closing of all non-Christian temples of worship. The original stele
broke at some point, its largest piece becoming what we now know as
the Rosetta Stone. Ancient Egyptian temples were later used as
quarries for new construction, and the Rosetta Stone probably was
re-used in this manner. Later it was incorporated in the foundations
of a fortress constructed by the Mameluke Sultan Qaitbay (c.
1416/18–1496) to defend the Bolbitine branch of the Nile at Rashid.
There it lay for at least another three centuries until its
rediscovery.
Three other inscriptions relevant to
the same Memphis decree have been found since the discovery of the
Rosetta Stone: the Nubayrah Stele, a stele found in Elephantine and
Noub Taha, and an inscription found at the Temple of Philae (on the
Philae obelisk). Unlike the Rosetta Stone, the hieroglyphic texts of
these inscriptions were relatively intact. The Rosetta Stone had been
deciphered long before they were found, but later Egyptologists have
used them to refine the reconstruction of the hieroglyphs that must
have been used in the lost portions of the hieroglyphic text on the
Rosetta Stone.
Rediscovery
Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt
inspired a burst of Egyptomania in Europe, and especially France. A
corps of 167 technical experts (savants), known as the Commission des
Sciences et des Arts, accompanied the French expeditionary army to
Egypt. On 15 July 1799, French soldiers under the command of Colonel
d'Hautpoul were strengthening the defenses of Fort Julien, a couple
of miles north-east of the Egyptian port city of Rosetta (modern-day
Rashid). Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard spotted a slab with
inscriptions on one side that the soldiers had uncovered. He and
d'Hautpoul saw at once that it might be important and informed
General Jacques-François Menou, who happened to be at Rosetta. The
find was announced to Napoleon's newly founded scientific association
in Cairo, the Institut d'Égypte, in a report by Commission member
Michel Ange Lancret noting that it contained three inscriptions, the
first in hieroglyphs and the third in Greek, and rightly suggesting
that the three inscriptions were versions of the same text. Lancret's
report, dated 19 July 1799, was read to a meeting of the Institute
soon after 25 July. Bouchard, meanwhile, transported the stone to
Cairo for examination by scholars. Napoleon himself inspected what
had already begun to be called la Pierre de Rosette, the Rosetta
Stone, shortly before his return to France in August 1799.
The discovery was reported in September
in Courrier de l'Égypte, the official newspaper of the French
expedition. The anonymous reporter expressed a hope that the stone
might one day be the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. In 1800 three
of the commission's technical experts devised ways to make copies of
the texts on the stone. One of these experts was Jean-Joseph Marcel,
a printer and gifted linguist, who is credited as the first to
recognize that the middle text was written in the Egyptian demotic
script, rarely used for stone inscriptions and seldom seen by
scholars at that time, rather than Syriac as had originally been
thought. It was artist and inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté who found
a way to use the stone itself as a printing block to reproduce the
inscription. A slightly different method was adopted by Antoine
Galland. The prints that resulted were taken to Paris by General
Charles Dugua. Scholars in Europe were now able to see the
inscriptions and attempt to read them.
After Napoleon's departure, French
troops held off British and Ottoman attacks for another 18 months. In
March 1801, the British landed at Aboukir Bay. Menou was now in
command of the French expedition. His troops, including the
commission, marched north towards the Mediterranean coast to meet the
enemy, transporting the stone along with many other antiquities. He
was defeated in battle, and the remnant of his army retreated to
Alexandria where they were surrounded and besieged, the stone now
inside the city. Menou surrendered on August 30.
From French to British possession
After the surrender, a dispute arose
over the fate of the French archaeological and scientific discoveries
in Egypt, including the artefacts, biological specimens, notes,
plans, and drawings collected by the members of the commission. Menou
refused to hand them over, claiming that they belonged to the
institute. British General John Hely-Hutchinson refused to end the
siege until Menou gave in. Scholars Edward Daniel Clarke and William
Richard Hamilton, newly arrived from England, agreed to examine the
collections in Alexandria and claimed to have found many artefacts
that the French had not revealed. In a letter home, Clarke said that
"we found much more in their possession than was represented or
imagined".
Hutchinson claimed that all materials
were property of the British Crown, but French scholar Étienne
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire told Clarke and Hamilton that the French would
rather burn all their discoveries than turn them over, referring
ominously to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Clarke and
Hamilton pleaded the French scholars' case to Hutchinson, who finally
agreed that items such as natural history specimens would be
considered the scholars' private property. Menou quickly claimed the
stone, too, as his private property. Hutchinson was equally aware of
the stone's unique value and rejected Menou's claim. Eventually an
agreement was reached, and the transfer of the objects was
incorporated into the Capitulation of Alexandria signed by
representatives of the British, French, and Ottoman forces.
It is not clear exactly how the stone
was transferred into British hands, as contemporary accounts differ.
Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who was to escort it to England,
claimed later that he had personally seized it from Menou and carried
it away on a gun-carriage. In a much more detailed account, Edward
Daniel Clarke stated that a French "officer and member of the
Institute" had taken him, his student John Cripps, and
Hamilton secretly into the back streets behind Menou's residence and
revealed the stone hidden under protective carpets among Menou's
baggage. According to Clarke, their informant feared that the stone
might be stolen if French soldiers saw it. Hutchinson was informed at
once and the stone was taken away—possibly by Turner and his
gun-carriage.
Turner brought the stone to England
aboard the captured French frigate HMS Egyptienne, landing in
Portsmouth in February 1802.[46] His orders were to present it and
the other antiquities to King George III. The King, represented by
War Secretary Lord Hobart, directed that it should be placed in the
British Museum. According to Turner's narrative, he and Hobart agreed
that the stone should be presented to scholars at the Society of
Antiquaries of London, of which Turner was a member, before its final
deposit in the museum. It was first seen and discussed there at a
meeting on 11 March 1802.
In 1802, the Society created four
plaster casts of the inscriptions, which were given to the
universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh and to Trinity
College Dublin. Soon afterwards, prints of the inscriptions were made
and circulated to European scholars. Before the end of 1802, the
stone was transferred to the British Museum, where it is located
today. New inscriptions painted in white on the left and right edges
of the slab stated that it was "Captured in Egypt by the
British Army in 1801" and "Presented by King George
III".
The stone has been exhibited almost
continuously in the British Museum since June 1802. During the
middle of the 19th century, it was given the inventory number "EA
24", "EA" standing for "Egyptian
Antiquities". It was part of a collection of ancient
Egyptian monuments captured from the French expedition, including a
sarcophagus of Nectanebo II (EA 10), the statue of a high priest of
Amun (EA 81), and a large granite fist (EA 9). The objects were soon
discovered to be too heavy for the floors of Montagu House (the
original building of The British Museum), and they were transferred
to a new extension that was added to the mansion. The Rosetta Stone
was transferred to the sculpture gallery in 1834 shortly after
Montagu House was demolished and replaced by the building that now
houses the British Museum. According to the museum's records, the
Rosetta Stone is its most-visited single object, a simple image of
it was the museum's best selling postcard for several decades, and a
wide variety of merchandise bearing the text from the Rosetta Stone
(or replicating its distinctive shape) is sold in the museum shops.
The Rosetta Stone was originally
displayed at a slight angle from the horizontal, and rested within a
metal cradle that was made for it, which involved shaving off very
small portions of its sides to ensure that the cradle fitted
securely. It originally had no protective covering, and it was found
necessary by 1847 to place it in a protective frame, despite the
presence of attendants to ensure that it was not touched by visitors.
Since 2004 the conserved stone has been on display in a specially
built case in the center of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. A replica
of the Rosetta Stone is now available in the King's Library of the
British Museum, without a case and free to touch, as it would have
appeared to early 19th-century visitors.
The museum was concerned about heavy
bombing in London towards the end of the First World War in 1917, and
the Rosetta Stone was moved to safety, along with other portable
objects of value. The stone spent the next two years 15 m (50 ft)
below ground level in a station of the Postal Tube Railway at Mount
Pleasant near Holborn. Other than during wartime, the Rosetta Stone
has left the British Museum only once: for one month in October 1972,
to be displayed alongside Champollion's Lettre at the Louvre in Paris
on the 150th anniversary of the letter's publication. Even when the
Rosetta Stone was undergoing conservation measures in 1999, the work
was done in the gallery so that it could remain visible to the
public.
Reading the Rosetta Stone
Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta
Stone and its eventual decipherment, the ancient Egyptian language
and script had not been understood since shortly before the fall of
the Roman Empire. The usage of the hieroglyphic script had become
increasingly specialized even in the later Pharaonic period; by the
4th century AD, few Egyptians were capable of reading them.
Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased as temple priesthoods died out
and Egypt was converted to Christianity; the last known inscription
is dated to 24 August 394, found at Philae and known as the Graffito
of Esmet-Akhom. The last demotic text, also from Philae, was written
in 452.
Hieroglyphs retained their pictorial
appearance, and classical authors emphasized this aspect, in sharp
contrast to the Greek and Roman alphabets. In the 5th century, the
priest Horapollo wrote Hieroglyphica, an explanation of almost 200
glyphs. His work was believed to be authoritative, yet it was
misleading in many ways, and this and other works were a lasting
impediment to the understanding of Egyptian writing. Later attempts
at decipherment were made by Arab historians in medieval Egypt during
the 9th and 10th centuries. Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya were
the first historians to study hieroglyphs, by comparing them to the
contemporary Coptic language used by Coptic priests in their time.
The study of hieroglyphs continued with fruitless attempts at
decipherment by European scholars, notably Johannes Goropius Becanus
in the 16th century, Athanasius Kircher in the 17th, and Georg Zoëga
in the 18th. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided
critical missing information, gradually revealed by a succession of
scholars, that eventually allowed Jean-François Champollion to solve
the puzzle that Kircher had called the riddle of the Sphinx.
Greek text
The Greek text on the Rosetta Stone
provided the starting point. Ancient Greek was widely known to
scholars, but they were not familiar with details of its use in the
Hellenistic period as a government language in Ptolemaic Egypt;
large-scale discoveries of Greek papyri were a long way in the
future. Thus, the earliest translations of the Greek text of the
stone show the translators still struggling with the historical
context and with administrative and religious jargon. Stephen Weston
verbally presented an English translation of the Greek text at a
Society of Antiquaries meeting in April 1802.
Meanwhile, two of the lithographic
copies made in Egypt had reached the Institut de France in Paris in
1801. There, librarian and antiquarian Gabriel de La Porte du Theil
set to work on a translation of the Greek, but he was dispatched
elsewhere on Napoleon's orders almost immediately, and he left his
unfinished work in the hands of colleague Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon.
Ameilhon produced the first published translations of the Greek text
in 1803, in both Latin and French to ensure that they would circulate
widely. At Cambridge, Richard Porson worked on the missing lower
right corner of the Greek text. He produced a skillful suggested
reconstruction, which was soon being circulated by the Society of
Antiquaries alongside its prints of the inscription. At almost the
same moment, Christian Gottlob Heyne in Göttingen was making a new
Latin translation of the Greek text that was more reliable than
Ameilhon's and was first published in 1803. It was reprinted by the
Society of Antiquaries in a special issue of its journal Archaeologia
in 1811, alongside Weston's previously unpublished English
translation, Colonel Turner's narrative, and other documents.
Demotic text
At the time of the stone's discovery,
Swedish diplomat and scholar Johan David Åkerblad was working on a
little-known script of which some examples had recently been found in
Egypt, which came to be known as demotic. He called it "cursive
Coptic" because he was convinced that it was used to record
some form of the Coptic language (the direct descendant of Ancient
Egyptian), although it had few similarities with the later Coptic
script. French Orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy had been
discussing this work with Åkerblad when he received one of the early
lithographic prints of the Rosetta Stone in 1801 from Jean-Antoine
Chaptal, French minister of the interior. He realized that the middle
text was in this same script. He and Åkerblad set to work, both
focusing on the middle text and assuming that the script was
alphabetical. They attempted to identify the points where Greek names
ought to occur within this unknown text, by comparing it with the
Greek. In 1802, Silvestre de Sacy reported to Chaptal that he had
successfully identified five names ("Alexandros",
"Alexandreia", "Ptolemaios", "Arsinoe",
and Ptolemy's title "Epiphanes"), while Åkerblad
published an alphabet of 29 letters (more than half of which were
correct) that he had identified from the Greek names in the demotic
text. They could not, however, identify the remaining characters in
the demotic text, which, as is now known, included ideographic and
other symbols alongside the phonetic ones.
Hieroglyphic text
Silvestre de Sacy eventually gave up
work on the stone, but he was to make another contribution. In 1811,
prompted by discussions with a Chinese student about Chinese script,
Silvestre de Sacy considered a suggestion made by Georg Zoëga in
1797 that the foreign names in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions
might be written phonetically; he also recalled that as early as
1761, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy had suggested that the characters
enclosed in cartouches in hieroglyphic inscriptions were proper
names. Thus, when Thomas Young, foreign secretary of the Royal
Society of London, wrote to him about the stone in 1814, Silvestre de
Sacy suggested in reply that in attempting to read the hieroglyphic
text, Young might look for cartouches that ought to contain Greek
names and try to identify phonetic characters in them.
Young did so, with two results that
together paved the way for the final decipherment. In the
hieroglyphic text, he discovered the phonetic characters "p t
o l m e s" (in today's transliteration "p t w l m y
s") that were used to write the Greek name "Ptolemaios".
He also noticed that these characters resembled the equivalent
ones in the demotic script, and went on to note as many as 80
similarities between the hieroglyphic and demotic texts on the stone,
an important discovery because the two scripts were previously
thought to be entirely different from one another. This led him to
deduce correctly that the demotic script was only partly phonetic,
also consisting of ideographic characters derived from hieroglyphs.
Young's new insights were prominent in the long article "Egypt"
that he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1819. He
could make no further progress, however.
In 1814, Young first exchanged
correspondence about the stone with Jean-François Champollion, a
teacher at Grenoble who had produced a scholarly work on ancient
Egypt. Champollion saw copies of the brief hieroglyphic and Greek
inscriptions of the Philae obelisk in 1822, on which William John
Bankes had tentatively noted the names "Ptolemaios"
and "Kleopatra" in both languages. From this,
Champollion identified the phonetic characters k l e o p a t r a (in
today's transliteration q l i҆ w p 3 d r 3.t). On the basis of this
and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he quickly constructed an
alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters, completing his work on
14 September and announcing it publicly on 27 September in a lecture
to the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. On the
same day he wrote the famous "Lettre à M. Dacier"
to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the Académie, detailing his
discovery. In the postscript Champollion notes that similar phonetic
characters seemed to occur in both Greek and Egyptian names, a
hypothesis confirmed in 1823, when he identified the names of
pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose written in cartouches at Abu Simbel.
These far older hieroglyphic inscriptions had been copied by Bankes
and sent to Champollion by Jean-Nicolas Huyot. From this point, the
stories of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian
hieroglyphs diverge, as Champollion drew on many other texts to
develop an Ancient Egyptian grammar and a hieroglyphic dictionary
which were published after his death in 1832.
Later work
Work on the stone now focused on fuller
understanding of the texts and their contexts by comparing the three
versions with one another. In 1824 Classical scholar Antoine-Jean
Letronne promised to prepare a new literal translation of the Greek
text for Champollion's use. Champollion in return promised an
analysis of all the points at which the three texts seemed to differ.
Following Champollion's sudden death in 1832, his draft of this
analysis could not be found, and Letronne's work stalled. François
Salvolini, Champollion's former student and assistant, died in 1838,
and this analysis and other missing drafts were found among his
papers. This discovery incidentally demonstrated that Salvolini's own
publication on the stone, published in 1837, was plagiarism.
Letronne was at last able to complete his commentary on the Greek
text and his new French translation of it, which appeared in 1841.
During the early 1850s, German Egyptologists Heinrich Brugsch and Max
Uhlemann produced revised Latin translations based on the demotic and
hieroglyphic texts. The first English translation followed in 1858,
the work of three members of the Philomathean Society at the
University of Pennsylvania.
Whether one of the three texts was the
standard version, from which the other two were originally
translated, is a question that has remained controversial. Letronne
attempted to show in 1841 that the Greek version, the product of the
Egyptian government under the Macedonian Ptolemies, was the original.
Among recent authors, John Ray has stated that "the
hieroglyphs were the most important of the scripts on the stone: they
were there for the gods to read, and the more learned of their
priesthood". Philippe Derchain and Heinz Josef Thissen have
argued that all three versions were composed simultaneously, while
Stephen Quirke sees in the decree "an intricate coalescence
of three vital textual traditions". Richard Parkinson points
out that the hieroglyphic version strays from archaic formalism and
occasionally lapses into language closer to that of the demotic
register that the priests more commonly used in everyday life. The
fact that the three versions cannot be matched word for word helps to
explain why the decipherment has been more difficult than originally
expected, especially for those original scholars who were expecting
an exact bilingual key to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Rivalries
Even before the Salvolini affair,
disputes over precedence and plagiarism punctuated the decipherment
story. Thomas Young's work is acknowledged in Champollion's 1822
Lettre à M. Dacier, but incompletely, according to early British
critics: for example, James Browne, a sub-editor on the Encyclopædia
Britannica (which had published Young's 1819 article), anonymously
contributed a series of review articles to the Edinburgh Review in
1823, praising Young's work highly and alleging that the
"unscrupulous" Champollion plagiarized it. These
articles were translated into French by Julius Klaproth and published
in book form in 1827. Young's own 1823 publication reasserted the
contribution that he had made. The early deaths of Young (1829) and
Champollion (1832) did not put an end to these disputes. In his work
on the stone in 1904 E. A. Wallis Budge gave special emphasis to
Young's contribution compared with Champollion's. In the early
1970s, French visitors complained that the portrait of Champollion
was smaller than one of Young on an adjacent information panel;
English visitors complained that the opposite was true. The portraits
were in fact the same size.
Requests for repatriation to Egypt
Calls for the Rosetta Stone to be
returned to Egypt were made in July 2003 by Zahi Hawass, then
Secretary-General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. These
calls, expressed in the Egyptian and international media, asked that
the stele be repatriated to Egypt, commenting that it was the "icon
of our Egyptian identity". He repeated the proposal two
years later in Paris, listing the stone as one of several key items
belonging to Egypt's cultural heritage, a list which also included:
the iconic bust of Nefertiti in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin; a
statue of the Great Pyramid architect Hemiunu in the
Roemer-und-Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim, Germany; the Dendera
Temple Zodiac in the Louvre in Paris; and the bust of Ankhhaf in the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
In 2005, the British Museum presented
Egypt with a full-sized fiberglass color-matched replica of the
stele. This was initially displayed in the renovated Rashid National
Museum, an Ottoman house in the town of Rashid (Rosetta), the closest
city to the site where the stone was found. In November 2005, Hawass
suggested a three-month loan of the Rosetta Stone, while reiterating
the eventual goal of a permanent return. In December 2009, he
proposed to drop his claim for the permanent return of the Rosetta
Stone if the British Museum lent the stone to Egypt for three months
for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza in 2013.
As John Ray has observed, "the
day may come when the stone has spent longer in the British Museum
than it ever did in Rosetta." There is strong opposition
among national museums to the repatriation of objects of
international cultural significance such as the Rosetta Stone. In
response to repeated Greek requests for return of the Elgin Marbles
from the Parthenon and similar requests to other museums around the
world, in 2002 over 30 of the world's leading museums—including the
British Museum, the Louvre, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the
Metropolitan Museum in New York City—issued a joint statement
declaring that "objects acquired in earlier times must be
viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values reflective
of that earlier era" and that "museums serve not
just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation".
Idiomatic use
Various ancient bilingual or even
trilingual epigraphical documents have sometimes been described as
"Rosetta stones", as they permitted the decipherment
of ancient written scripts. For example, the bilingual Greek-Brahmi
coins of the Greco-Bactrian king Agathocles have been described as
"little Rosetta stones", allowing to secure the first
steps towards the decipherment of the Brahmi script by Christian
Lassen, thus unlocking ancient Indian epigraphy. The Behistun
inscription has also been compared to the Rosetta stone, as it links
the translations of three ancient Middle-Eastern languages: Old
Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian.
The term Rosetta stone has been also
used idiomatically to represent a crucial key in the process of
decryption of encoded information, especially when a small but
representative sample is recognized as the clue to understanding a
larger whole. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first
figurative use of the term appeared in the 1902 edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica relating to an entry on the chemical
analysis of glucose. Another use of the phrase is found in H. G.
Wells' 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, where the protagonist
finds a manuscript written in shorthand that provides a key to
understanding additional scattered material that is sketched out in
both longhand and on typewriter.
Since then, the term has been widely
used in other contexts. For example, Nobel laureate Theodor W. Hänsch
in a 1979 Scientific American article on spectroscopy wrote that "the
spectrum of the hydrogen atoms has proved to be the Rosetta Stone of
modern physics: once this pattern of lines had been deciphered much
else could also be understood". Fully understanding the key
set of genes to the human leucocyte antigen has been described as
"the Rosetta Stone of immunology". The flowering
plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been called the "Rosetta Stone
of flowering time". A Gamma ray burst (GRB) found in
conjunction with a supernova has been called a Rosetta Stone for
understanding the origin of GRBs. The technique of Doppler
echocardiography has been called a Rosetta Stone for clinicians
trying to understand the complex process by which the left ventricle
of the human heart can be filled during various forms of diastolic
dysfunction.
The name has also become used in
various forms of translation software. Rosetta Stone is a brand of
language-learning software published by Rosetta Stone Inc.,
headquartered in Arlington County, US. "Rosetta" is
the name of a "lightweight dynamic translator" that
enables applications compiled for PowerPC processors to run on Apple
Inc. systems using an x86 processor. It was later used for
applications compiled for the Intel instruction set to be run on Macs
built with Apple's ARM CPUs. "Rosetta" is an online
language translation tool to help localization of software, developed
and maintained by Canonical as part of the Launchpad project.
Similarly, Rosetta@home is a distributed computing project for
predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences (or
translating sequence into structure). The Rosetta Project brings
language specialists and native speakers together to develop a
meaningful survey and near-permanent archive of 1,500 languages,
intended to last from AD 2000 to 12,000. The European Space Agency's
Rosetta spacecraft was launched to study the comet
67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in the hope that determining its
composition will reveal the origin of the Solar System.
