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Rosetta stone: How a dead language was decoded

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"Ancient Egypt exerts a powerful pull on the imagination of every generation, refusing to stay buried in the past. But much of what we now take for granted about this world of mummies, pyramids and tombs had for centuries remained shrouded in silence until French soldiers stumbled upon a broken slab of an inscribed stone in 1799. The artifact depicted three different ancient scripts. Found while Napoleon's army was digging the foundations of a fort in Rosetta, now El-Rashid, Egypt, the stone provided the key to decoding hieroglyphics — the ancient Egyptian writing system — and unleashed the secrets of one of the world's oldest civilizations. Under the terms of Napoleon's defeat in the region, British forces shipped the slab, made of a dark, granite-like stone known as granodiorite, to Britain and it arrived at The British Museum in 1802. Casts were made and shipped to Egyptologists across Europe — an early attempt at crowdsourcing. "Within two years after the discovery of the stone, every European country had possession of a copy of the stone. And that was a conscious process by scholars to distribute the text, because everybody wanted to speed up the process," Regulski said. The broken stone features three scripts in two languages — 14 lines of formal hieroglyphs, 32 lines in the demotic language (the simplified, everyday handwriting used in ancient Egypt) and 54 lines of ancient Greek — the only one of the three understood at the time. The inscription itself is a mass decree passed in 196 BC by a council of priests to mark the first anniversary of the coronation of 13-year-old Ptolemy V Epiphanes." 10/22/22 https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/rosetta-stone-british-museum-200-year-anniversary-scn/index.html

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rosetta stone

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