Rosetta stone what is it

It had apparently been built into a very old wall. The city of Rosetta around the time the Rosetta Stone was found. Hand-coloured aquatint etching by Thomas Milton after Luigi Mayer , — The stone was shipped to England and arrived in Portsmouth in February Soon after the end of the 4th century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared.

In the early years of the 19th century, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young — , an English physicist, was one of the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy.

A letter from Thomas Young written on 10 February asking William Bankes to seek out these hieroglyphic examples whilst in Egypt. The meanings he suggests for these groups are mostly correct, but he was unable to analyse how the signs conveyed their meaning.

This laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture. Champollion made a crucial step in understanding ancient Egyptian writing when he identified the hieroglyphs that were used to write the names of non-Egyptian rulers.

He announced his discovery, which had been based on analysis of the Rosetta Stone and other texts, in a paper at the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres at Paris on Friday 27 September The audience included his English rival Thomas Young, who was also trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. Champollion then made a second crucial breakthrough, realising that the alphabetic signs were used not only for foreign names, but also for Egyptian names.

Together with his knowledge of the Coptic language , which derived from ancient Egyptian, this allowed him to begin reading hieroglyphic inscriptions fully.

The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests. It is one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation in BC. You can read the full translation here. According to the inscription on the Stone, an identical copy of the declaration was to be placed in every sizeable temple across Egypt.

Whether this happened is unknown, but copies of the same bilingual, three-script decree have now been found and can be seen in other museums. The Rosetta Stone is thus one of many mass-produced stelae designed to widely disseminate an agreement issued by a council of priests in BC.

Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. The Discovery of the Rosetta Stone It wasn't until the 19th century—two thousand years after its creation—that the Rosetta Stone helped scholars at long last crack the code of hieroglyphics.

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