History Of The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous archeological finds in the world. At the time of its discovery in 1799, the significance this stone would have was unimaginable. Before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, little was known about Egyptian hieroglyphs or what they represented. The Rosetta Stone was crucial to our understand Egyptian hieroglyphs, and it allowed us to better understand the culture of ancient Egypt.

The Rosetta Stone was discovered in July 1799 at Rosetta (now el-Rashid) in Egypt (Cracking Codes 20). Pierre Francois Xavier Bouchard, a soldier in Napoleon’s army, discovered the stone while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort (Cracking Codes 20). He recognized the stone as part of a stele, or slab marking government notices or territory (Cracking Codes 20). Bouchard reported the discovery to a French general, Jacques-Francois Menou, who had the stone excavated and cleaned (Cracking Codes 21). News of the discovery spread quickly, but no one was able to immediately decipher the writings (Cracking Codes 21). Upon Napoleon’s defeat, the stone became property of the British under terms of the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801(Cracking Codes 22).

The Rosetta Stone is composed of black granitic and quartz rock (Bierbrier 113) but is commonly mistaken for black basalt, because it was treated with carnauba wax for protection and white chalk was used to emphasize the writings (Cracking Codes 23). The Rosetta stone is currently 112.3 centimeters in length, 75.7 centimeters in width, 28.4 centimeters thick and weighs approximately 1680 pounds (The British Museum Collection Online). On it, a decree on behalf of King Ptolemy V appears in three scripts: the upper text is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle text ...

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...layed in the British Museum since 1802 (Cracking Codes 8). In July 2003, Egypt demanded that the Rosetta Stone be returned to Cairo (Edwardes and Milner 2003). The director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo said, “If the British want to be remembered, if they want to restore their reputation, they should volunteer to return the Rosetta Stone because it is the icon of our Egyptian identity.” (Edwardes and Milner 2003). As of 2009, the British and the Egyptians were in talks to loan the Rosetta Stone to Egypt’s Grand Museum for a short period of time (al-Atrush 2009).

The term “Rosetta stone” is now used idiomatically to represent crucial information when decoding language. This colloquial use is certainly accurate; The Rosetta Stone played a key role in our understanding of hieroglyphs, and without it we might never comprehend ancient Egyptian culture.