The Rosetta Stone: One Decree in Three Scripts

In July 1799, French soldiers of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt were rebuilding an old fort near the Nile port of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta. The engineer officer Pierre-François Bouchard noticed a slab of dark granodiorite built into a wall. It carried three bands of writing: hieroglyphs at the top, broken; a flowing Egyptian script in the middle; and Greek at the bottom. The scholars with the army understood at once that if the three said the same thing, the Greek might unlock the other two. When the French surrendered Egypt in 1801, the stone was handed to the British under the Treaty of Alexandria. It has been in the British Museum since 1802.

What it says

The text is a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BCE by a council of Egyptian priests, honouring the young king Ptolemy V Epiphanes on the anniversary of his coronation. It lists his good deeds, such as tax remissions, gifts to temples and the restoration of order, and in return grants him divine honours: statues in every temple and festivals on his birthday. It ends by ordering the decree to be set up in sacred (hieroglyphic), native (Demotic) and Greek letters. Copies stood in temples across Egypt; the Rosetta Stone is one of them.

The decipherment

Knowledge of hieroglyphs had been lost since late antiquity. Scholars had long thought them pure symbols of mystical ideas.

• Thomas Young, an English physicist, showed from 1814 that the cartouches (ovals) enclosed royal names, and worked out the sound values of several signs in the name of Ptolemy. But he thought phonetic signs were used only for foreign names.
• Jean-François Champollion compared the Ptolemy cartouche with a Cleopatra cartouche on an obelisk from Philae, brought to England by William Bankes. The shared signs for p, t, o and l confirmed the readings. He then showed that the system was used for Egyptian words too, a mixture of sound signs and meaning signs. He announced this in his Lettre à M. Dacier on 27 September 1822, the date often given for the birth of Egyptology.

The interactive object above lets you follow the first step: the name Ptolemy, sign by sign.

Who owns it?

The stone was taken as a spoil of war. Egyptian scholars and officials, including Zahi Hawass, have repeatedly called for its return, and a 2022 petition gathered wide support. The British Museum's position has been that it is legally part of its collection. The question is open and actively contested.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Three scripts, three audiences. Hieroglyphs were the "words of the gods", carved on temples. Demotic was the everyday script of Egyptian administration. Greek was the language of the Ptolemaic court. The decree speaks to gods, Egyptians and rulers at once.

The cartouche. The oval ring round a royal name is a rope loop symbolising all that the sun encircles: the king as ruler of the world (see the Pyramid Texts, V34).

The king as god. The decree turns political gratitude into cult: the Macedonian king becomes an Egyptian god in temple worship, the same pattern as Egypt's ancient sacred kingship.

Connections

Egypt (ch02) and Sacred Kingship (ch49). Compare the Behistun Inscription (V54), which did for cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone did for hieroglyphs, and the Phaistos Disc (V56), which has no bilingual and remains unread.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/rosetta-stone.html