Rosetta Stone

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Rosetta Stone is a slab of dark grey granodiorite, 112.3 centimetres tall and weighing roughly 760 kilograms, that spent centuries buried in the foundations of a fort before changing the course of human knowledge. When a French army officer named Pierre-François Bouchard spotted it in July 1799, sticking out from a demolished wall at Fort Julien near the Egyptian port of Rosetta, he was looking at a document that had been waiting nearly two thousand years to be read. Carved in 196 BC on the orders of a priestly congress gathered at Memphis, it carried the same text in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top, the everyday Egyptian script called Demotic in the middle, and Ancient Greek at the bottom. For over a millennium, no living person could read the top two. How did a single battered stone unlock a lost civilisation? And why did it take scholars more than two decades, a bitter international rivalry, and one act of outright plagiarism before the answer finally came?

• 2. The Stone Itself

  ›

  When archaeologists examined the Rosetta Stone after it was cleaned in 1999, they found a pink vein running across the top left corner that pointed to its origins. Comparisons with a collection of Egyptian rock samples identified a close match with granodiorite from a quarry at Gebel Tingar, on the west bank of the Nile near Aswan. The front surface is polished and the inscriptions are lightly incised into it; the sides are smoothed, but the back is only roughly worked, which suggests the back was never meant to be seen when the stele stood upright in its original location. The stone as it exists today is a fragment. Only the last 14 lines of the hieroglyphic text survive, all broken on the right side and most of them damaged on the left as well. The middle Demotic register fared better, preserving 32 lines. The Greek text at the bottom runs to 54 lines, though only the first 27 survive in full before a diagonal break at the lower right destroys the rest. Using the slightly earlier Decree of Canopus, erected in 238 BC and measuring 2190 millimetres tall, as a comparison, scholars estimate that around 14 or 15 lines of hieroglyphic text are missing from the top, and that the original stele stood roughly 149 centimetres high. That missing section would also have shown the king being presented to the gods, topped by a winged disc, as on the Canopus stele. The stone's colour misled early observers: a layer of carnauba wax applied to protect it from visitors' fingers, along with chalk used to whiten the inscriptions, gave the surface a nearly black appearance and led to the mistaken label of black basalt. The 1999 cleaning removed all of that, revealing the sparkle of the rock's crystalline structure for the first time in living memory.

• 3. A Decree in Three Languages

  ›

  The text inscribed on the stone was issued on the 27th of March, 196 BC, on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes, then twelve years old. Ptolemy V had become ruler at the age of five after both of his parents died in a conspiracy involving the royal mistress Agathoclea, according to contemporary sources. Agathoclea and her family were later lynched by a mob in Alexandria when a revolt broke out under the general Tlepolemus. By the time the decree was issued, Egypt was under serious external pressure: Antiochus III and Philip V of Macedon had carved up its overseas territories, and the Battle of Panium in 198 BC had stripped the Ptolemies of Coele-Syria, including Judaea. An internal revolt in the south, led first by Horwennefer and then by his successor Ankhwennefer, was still ongoing. Against that backdrop, the decree was a political instrument. It recorded that Ptolemy V had given gifts of silver and grain to the temples and had ordered the damming of flood waters during a particularly high Nile flood in his eighth year, to protect farmers. In exchange, the priests pledged that his birthday and coronation day would be celebrated annually and that all priests of Egypt would serve him alongside the other gods. The decree closes with the instruction that copies must be placed in every temple, inscribed in the language of the gods (hieroglyphs), the language of documents (Demotic), and the language of the Greeks used by the Ptolemaic government. Stelae of this kind, initiated by the temples rather than the crown, were unique to Ptolemaic Egypt. In earlier Pharaonic tradition, only the divine ruler could make national decisions; the priestly glorification of the king was borrowed instead from the custom of Greek cities. The high priests of Memphis, where the coronation took place and where the decree was issued, held the highest religious authority in the land, and securing their loyalty was the clearest path to ruling a population that was not Greek.

• 4. From Egypt to England

  ›

  Napoleon's army invaded Egypt in 1798, accompanied by 151 technical experts known as the Commission des Sciences et des Arts. When Lieutenant Bouchard brought the stone to the attention of General Menou and the Institut d'Egypte in Cairo, the announcement was received at the Institute on the 19th of July 1799. The reporter who covered the discovery in the French occupational newspaper Courrier de l'Egypte, writing anonymously in September, expressed the hope that it might one day be the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. An expert named Jean-Joseph Marcel was the first to recognise that the middle script was Demotic, not Syriac as earlier assumed. Nicolas-Jacques Conte devised a way to use the stone itself as a printing block; Antoine Galland adopted a slightly different method. The prints went to Paris with General Charles Dugua, putting the inscriptions in front of European scholars for the first time. Napoleon left Egypt in August 1799, and British forces landed at Abu Qir Bay in March 1801. The French defeat in the Battle of Alexandria ended with Menou's forces besieged in the city, the stone inside it. When Menou surrendered on the 30th of August, a fierce dispute broke out over the scientific collections the French expedition had assembled. Menou claimed the stone as private property. Scholars Edward Daniel Clarke and William Richard Hamilton documented what they found in the French stores; Clarke wrote home that "we found much more in their possession than was represented or imagined". One French scholar, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, threatened to burn the discoveries rather than surrender them, invoking the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. The stand-off was resolved when General Hutchinson agreed that natural history specimens could remain with the French scholars; the stone then changed hands by means that are still disputed. Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner claimed he seized it personally and carried it off on a gun-carriage. Clarke offered a different account: that a French officer had secretly led him and Hamilton to the stone, which was hidden under carpets among Menou's baggage. Turner brought it to England aboard the captured frigate HMS Egyptienne, landing in Portsmouth in February 1802. King George III directed that it be placed in the British Museum. Before it arrived there, it was shown at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries of London on the 11th of March 1802, the first time scholars in Britain could examine it directly.

• 5. Cracking the Code

  ›

  Stephen Weston presented the first English translation of the Greek text at a Society of Antiquaries meeting in April 1802, but the deeper puzzle was the two Egyptian scripts above it. The published translations of the Greek that appeared in 1803, produced independently in Paris by Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon and in Gottingen by Christian Gottlob Heyne, gave scholars a reliable anchor. Working from that anchor, French Orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Swedish scholar Johan David Akerblad both focused on the Demotic text. In 1802, Silvestre de Sacy identified five Greek names within it: Alexandros, Alexandreia, Ptolemaios, Arsinoe, and the royal title Epiphanes. Akerblad published an alphabet of 29 Demotic letters, more than half of them correct, derived from those Greek names. Neither man could account for the remaining characters, which included ideographic symbols alongside phonetic ones. Thomas Young, foreign secretary of the Royal Society of London, picked up the hieroglyphic problem in 1814 after Silvestre de Sacy suggested in a letter that cartouches in the hieroglyphic text were likely to contain Greek names spelled phonetically. Young found the phonetic characters spelling Ptolemaios in the hieroglyphic text, and he noticed that those characters closely resembled their counterparts in the Demotic script. He went on to catalogue as many as 80 similarities between the hieroglyphic and Demotic registers, which led him to the correct conclusion that Demotic was only partly phonetic and also included ideographic characters derived from hieroglyphs. He published these findings in a long article on Egypt for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1819. Jean-Francois Champollion, a teacher at Grenoble who had been corresponding with Young since 1814, saw copies of the brief hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions from the Philae obelisk in 1822. William John Bankes had tentatively noted the names Ptolemaios and Kleopatra in both languages on that obelisk. From Kleopatra, Champollion identified the phonetic characters for k, l, e, o, p, a, t, r, and a. He completed his work on the 14th of September 1822 and announced his findings publicly on the 27th of September in a lecture to the Academie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, sending his famous Lettre a M. Dacier to secretary Bon-Joseph Dacier on the same day. His hypothesis was confirmed in 1823 when he identified the names of pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose in cartouches at Abu Simbel, inscriptions that predated the Ptolemaic period by more than a thousand years.

• 6. Rivalry and Plagiarism

  ›

  Champollion's 1822 Lettre acknowledges Young's contribution, but British critics argued the acknowledgment was incomplete. James Browne, a sub-editor at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, anonymously published a series of review articles in the Edinburgh Review in 1823 accusing Champollion of plagiarising Young. Julius Klaproth translated those articles into French, and they appeared in book form in 1827. Young published his own restatement of his contribution in 1823. Both men died young: Young in 1829 and Champollion in 1832. A different scandal surfaced after Champollion's death. His former student and assistant Francois Salvolini died in 1838, and among his papers were found Champollion's missing drafts, including the analysis of the three texts that Champollion had promised to Antoine-Jean Letronne. That discovery incidentally proved that Salvolini's own 1837 publication on the stone had been plagiarism. The arguments between the French and British camps over credit had a physical dimension at the British Museum itself: in the early 1970s, French visitors complained that Champollion's portrait on an information panel was smaller than a nearby portrait of Young, while English visitors complained the reverse was true. The portraits were, in fact, the same size. Even today, scholars debate which of the three versions was the master text. John Ray has argued that the hieroglyphs were paramount because they were there for the gods to read; Philippe Derchain and Heinz Josef Thissen have contended that all three were composed at once; Richard Parkinson has noted that the hieroglyphic version occasionally lapses into language closer to everyday Demotic, as though the priests who drafted it slipped between registers.

• 7. The Stone Beyond Egypt

  ›

  During the First World War, the British Museum feared heavy bombing over London and moved the Rosetta Stone to safety in 1917. It spent the following two years stored 15 metres underground in a station of the Postal Tube Railway at Mount Pleasant, near Holborn. The one time it left the museum outside of wartime was in October 1972, when it travelled to the Louvre in Paris for one month to be displayed alongside Champollion's Lettre on the 150th anniversary of that letter's publication. In July 2003, Zahi Hawass, then Secretary-General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, publicly called for the stone's return to Egypt, describing it as the "icon of our Egyptian identity". He repeated the call in 2005, listing the stone alongside other artefacts Egypt sought, including the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin, a statue of the architect Hemiunu in Hildesheim, the Dendera Temple Zodiac in the Louvre, and the bust of Ankhhaf in Boston. The British Museum responded in 2005 by presenting Egypt with a full-sized fibreglass colour-matched replica, initially displayed in the renovated Rashid National Museum in the town of Rosetta. In 2009, Hawass proposed dropping his claim for permanent return if the museum would lend the original for three months for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza. As of 2022, he had reiterated his demands again. The stone's name has since entered the language as a general term for any small but representative key that unlocks a larger system of knowledge. Nobel laureate Theodor W. Hansch applied it to the spectrum of the hydrogen atom in a 1979 Scientific American article on spectroscopy, writing that "the spectrum of the hydrogen atoms has proven to be the Rosetta Stone of modern physics: once this pattern of lines had been deciphered much else could also be understood". The European Space Agency named its mission to study the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after the stone, in the hope that the comet's composition might illuminate the origins of the Solar System.