The rosetta stone is the most famous and critical object in the British Museum. According to the museum’s figures, it is the most visited item in the entire display and perhaps the most lingered over. However, a similar appeal is sometimes made for the unwrapped mummy of a ginger tomcat which also forms part of the Egyptian collections. The stone is one of the world’s wonders; however, it does not feature in lists of its wonders. It is not a monumental building, but it attracts pilgrims in the way that imposing ruins do. In mundane reality, it was part of a mass-produced chain of stelae, a technique for slabs of stone designed to perpetuate the official records of the Egyptian state what it records in a decree, the text of an agreement issued jointly by a king and a synod of ancient Egyptian priests. Its purpose was to witness the king’s benevolence towards his people and his piety towards the gods. It was the sort of thing a reasonable and fair king was expected to do and to go on doing.
The inscription on the stone placed an identical copy of the decree in every sizable temple in the land. Whether to be placed in every sizable temple in the land, whether this happened is impossible to say, but free copies of the same trilingual decree have been found and can be seen in other museums. We are 112 centimeters high and 76 centimeters wide, but the original stone was considerably taller.
Its upper register would have been decorated with figures of the king and the temple’s gods where it stood. They are long gone. Of the hieroglyphic text which formed its second register, only a third is left. The hieroglyphs were the most important of the scripts on the stone; they were for the gods to read and the more learned of their priesthood.
Scarcely changed The grammar and vocabulary of this section of the decree from what they would have been 2000 years earlier.
The greek text which forms the bottom register has also lost one of its corners.
Since the reign of Alexander the Great in 332 b.c, Egypt was ruled by the family of Ptolemies, carrying on the titles of “Egyptian kings,” although Greek was now the government’s language.
However, in the hierarchical world of Egyptian temples, this johnny-come-lately script, a miserable alphabet with not more than twenty-four signs and no religious connotations whatsoever, had no choice but to remain on the bottom row. The inscriptions above the greek register are the best preserved, even not complete. It is composed in demotic, a form of hieroglyphic for people, the standard script for day-to-day affairs in Egypt of the Ptolemies, and closest to the most spoken language of the most population.
The rosetta stone lay for centuries in the ruins of a temple, maybe in the city of Sais or somewhere in the Nile delta. At some point, what remained was reused as a building material since it could no longer read its long silent inscriptions. It may not have reached the rosetta until later in the fifteenth century when the recycled fort was constructed. It lay buried in this fort until the summer of 1799, when the French, who had invaded Egypt the previous year, restructured the building as part of their efforts to secure the coast. The French officers sensed that the stone was something extraordinary. Off it went to Cairo, and the attention of Napoleon’s think tank, the savants of the so-called institute D’Egypte.
Its existence among the French was to be short-lived. It was destined to fall into the hands of their arch-enemy, the British.
The day may come when the stone has spent longer in the British Museum than it ever did in Rosetta. Since it arrived in the museum as spoils of war in June 1802, it has never left its adopted home, apart from being moved to shelter during the two world wars. There was also a brief visit to Paris in 1972 to celebrate the centenary and a half of its decipherment.
The press at the time made much of the possibility that the evil French were preparing to kidnap it. Nothing of the sort occurred, and it is now back in the Egyptian galleries.
A part of its history in the museum was displayed without a glass cover to touch its surface.
The museum has placed a replica in the king’s library to run their hands over the inscriptions. It is as if this old piece of granite has become the modern version of a religious relic.
Religious relics in the middle ages were a center for the tourist industry, and they spawned replicas and souvenirs. The stone is no exception. There are postcards, facsimiles, booklets, and imitations everywhere on sale.
The stone can readily be called iconic. It has been an icon of Egyptology since it gave birth to that science. It is an icon of genius since its mysteries attracted two formidable intellects, one English and one french. Thomas Young and Jean Francois Champollion are two of the most remarkable minds of the Napoleonic age, and the differences between them are equally revealing. But can fight over an icon. The stone may have hoped to bring understanding and civilization to future ages, but it has also proved capable of spreading division and recriminations.
During the lifetimes of young and Champollion, many tried to set up two men against each other. After their death, a feud intensified between their respective supportive supporters, which started to look like a replay of the Napoleonic wars.
The stone may be part of an ancient past, but it is also an icon of the modern world since it gave us back one of the most extended and most romantic chapters of our history, a chapter which had been thought lost beyond recall. To recover memory is to regain identity. The rosetta stone is, in effect, an emblem of Egypt’s identity.
Discovery of the rosetta stone.
The well-known, irregularly-shaped black basalt in the British Museum, which is now globally known as the “rosetta stone,” was discovered at a spot that lies a few miles to the north of the little town on the left bank of an arm of the Nile, which in ancient days was called the “bolbitinic arm,” in the western delta, about 5 miles of the river’s mouth, and around 30 miles from Alexandria, which 30 lies to the west.
The name Rashid is that by which the town is known to the west. The name Rashid is that by which the town is known till now.
Rosetta Stone was discovered in the qaitbay fortress in Rashid city, which was constructed in 1479 A.D. to fortify the northern borders of Egypt on the mediterranean sea. This fortress collected architectural elements from Byzantine and Islamic; it is one of the best examples of fortresses that played an essential role in fortifying Egypt from European attacks. It is rectangular with a circular tower on each corner, plus rooms for soldiers, stores for food supply, and a mosque.
By the arrival of the French expedition to Egypt, they gave much care to fortify the forts of Egypt, and the fort of Rashid was called fort “san Julian.” who was one of 16 soldiers who were killed on 12 august 1798 by indigenous during their way from Rashid to Cairo.
And to commemorate their event, they called this fort “san Julian,” and during restoration in this place, one of the French officers called bushar to the eastern north side discovered this stone as a part of a wall.
And from the first sight, he realized the value of this stone, so he sent it directly to his general “meno,” who transferred it to Alexandria and then to the scientific constituent in Cairo.
Scientific constituent in Cairo was constructed on 20 august 1789, by decree of Napoleon Bonaparte. Its goal is to work to get scientific progress, spreading science and knowledge
Surrender of the rosetta stone to the British.
Meanwhile, the British forces had gained many victories over the French expedition in Egypt. After Alexandria’s surrender treaty, monumental items which the French had discovered and collected in Cairo and Alexandria were surrendered to them, according to the treaty of capitulation at the end of the year 1801.
Rosetta Stone was among them and arrived in England in February 1802 and, as a result of a description of it published in Paris, created a great sensation. The copies of the inscriptions which general dugua had taken to Paris were committed to the care of “citoyen du theil.”
Who read the Greek text immediately declared that the stone was a monument of gratitude of some priests of Alexandria, or some neighboring place, towards Ptolemy the fifth.
He went on to say that the first and second texts on the stone contained repetitions of Greek content, and that, as the last line but one of the greek.
Decipherment of hieroglyphics!
Before writing about deciphering hieroglyphics, it is essential to know the reason behind this decipherment :
By the end of the 4th century, the ancient Egyptian language became out of use, the knowledge and talent about how to use and read hieroglyphics disappeared.
The last text was written in the ancient Egyptian language in philea island inside the temple of goddess Isis, and it was written in the 2nd-century a.d.
Until the 19th century, scholars started to decipher the ancient Greek language. One of the pioneers of this work was Thomas Young, a British physicist, who showed that the wrote on rosetta stone sound to be forking Ptolemy.
Then appeared Jean Francois Champollion, who realized that hieroglyphics was the sound of the ancient Egyptian language. He made a crucial step when he identified hierophanies to write the non-Egyptian rulers.
He announced his theory during his work on rosetta stone and his texts on 27 September 1822.
He had lots of audience and rivals who tried meanwhile to decipher hieroglyphics.
But Champollion made another crucial step when he mentioned that the alphabetic signs of hieroglyphics were used for foreign rulers and Egyptian names.
His knowledge of the Coptic language, derived from the ancient Egyptian language, allowed him to read the hieroglyphics texts thoroughly.
The text of rosetta stone
The text of the stone was a decree by King Ptolemy the 5th. It was written on slabs of stones in each temple of Egypt rosetta was one of these copies; the decree was an exemption of taxes in the year 195 b.c, and this came as a result of revolutions and sticks during the reign of his predecessor Ptolemy the 4th. So on rosetta stone, the priests of Memphis declare their gratitude and thank the king, supporting him.
The stone was divided into three parts.
The first part: consists of 14 lines written by hieroglyphics, the holy writing for religious texts and priests in ancient Egypt.
The second part: consists of 32 lines written by demotic; the Greek word demos is derived from demic, which means popular. It was the popular alphabet for ordinary people.
The third part: consists of 53 lines written by ancient Greek. It was the language of the Macedonian rulers who ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great.
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