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Translation methods
History of the Rosetta Stone
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Introduction
The Rosetta stone the key to the Egyptians
I chose the Rosetta stone because of its mysteries and unsolved scripts and hieroglyphics. It occurred to me when I was reading up on Egyptians. I hope to learn the guarded secrets it holds so I can know to decipher the ancient texts and to reveal the secrets of the Egyptians.
The Rosetta stone is found in a British museum in London.
The Rosetta stone is three feet nine inches long, two feet four and a half inches wide, and eleven inches thick.
The Rosetta stone was discovered in 1799 that may mean that it has been lost for almost 1400 years.
Athanasius kircher, a German priest of the 1600s, wrote the first grammar and vocabulary of Coptic, the language of the Christian Egypt.
The French general Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt with an army of 38,000 soldiers.
Egyptians wrote on stones called slabs.
In 1802, the Rosetta stone was shipped to England.
On august 1st the British army caught the French fleet off guard and completely destroyed Alexandria.
After almost one hundred years of deciphering the Rosetta stones hieroglyphics were translated in 1850.
The Rosetta stone has three different scripts.
People who could write in ancient times were called scribes.
Scribes wrote on paper called papyrus.
The advance language called Coptic replaced the ancient Egyptians language.
Coptic had then had been replaced by a further advanced language called Arabic.
Egyptians wrote in sign called hieroglyphics.
Instead of the word people in Egyptian language it was called demotic.
On July 1,1798 Napoleons army captured the city Alexandria.
Napoleon entered the Egyptian capital, Cairo in July on the 21st.
Egyptian text that was enclosed in an oval outline is called a cartouche.
Cartouche a French word meaning cartridge.
French surrender to British September 1801.
Jean François Champollion was born 1790.
Champollion graduated in 1807.
Champollion, in 1822 was reserved a position on deciphering the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone.
Thothmes was a pharaoh who ruled from 1501 to 1447 B.C.
A book on hieroglyphics was published in 1824.
On March 4, 1832 Champollion died in series of strokes.
By 2500 B.C. complete sentences began appearing on tomb inscriptions.
Demotic was first known as hieratic.
The French discovered the Rosetta stone in 1799.
Conclusion
The researcher learned that the Rosetta stone is one of the most important artifacts of the Egyptians. It was written in three ancient scripts and is located at the British museum in London.
They gave up after some time in which many others came flocking to the area to continue digging. Supposedly, this was towards the end of the pirate era and many believe that Captain Kidd must have left his treasure on that island. There were a few “mysterious” objects that were unearthed; wooden planks, discovered the hole was a shaft, chains, and a stone of inscriptions which was supposedly translated to, “Forty feet below two million pounds are buried.” This is a red flag for several reasons: 1. The stone was translated in the late 1800’s which has been discovered in class to be a very problematic year for gaining any valid information on anything. 2. The stone was anonymously translated so no mention of who the expert was other than that it was a Halifax professor. 3. After it had been translated, the stone “mysteriously” disappears and no one sees or hears of it again. So far, the series are turning out to be quite the
The Rosetta Stone was found in the town of Rosetta and sent to French scholars in Alexandria during the summer of 1799 (Giblin 23). This black, measuring 112 by 76 stone found while the soldiers in the town were destroying a citadel was unprecedented because it had three different languages on it, the only understood one being Greek (Silet 1). The three languages on the stone were, as stated, Greek, the common Egyptian demotic, and 14 lines of hieroglyphics (Giblin 27). Scholars familiar with the Greek language and writing system were able to translate that section, and the final sentence revealed a fact that set the groundwork for future translations of the other parts. The final line reads: “This decree shall be inscribed on a stela of hard stone in sacred and native and Greek characters” (Giblin 27). It came to be understood that the three sections all contained the same message, and scholars promptly set to work on the translations.
Nineteenth century British explorer Henry Rawlinson was among the first archeologists to draw attention to the importance of cuneiform writing. Arguably, his most valuable discovery was the monument at Bisitun in present-day Iran; Bitisun is a massive memorial to Darius, famed king of ancient Persia. Accor...
...h Museum. It contains the theological, cosmological and philosophical views of the Egyptians. Inscribed is also the name of an Egyptian Pharaoh who copied an inscription of his ancestors, this was around 700 B.C., the time when Egypt developed one of their first dynasties, Memphis. The Memphite Theology consists of 3 parts of text and philosophy.
Rosetta Stone was a major factor in Egypt’s way of writing ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. The stone was founded by Napoleon’s army in 1799 in the Nile delta. Britain has had the Rosetta Stone for the past 200 years. The British Museum has it as a centerpiece in their Egyptology collection. A man by the name of Zahi Hawass, who is the director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo, has made it a point to negotiate with academics and curators at the British Museum on getting the stone back.
Not too far away from the town of Montignac, in the western Massif Central and Northern Pyrenees, the cave of Lascaux was discovered. Four teenage boys and their dog discovered it. The four boys, Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coenccus, were out on an expedition, but they found more than they bargained for that day. Their dog wandered away and they searched for him. In the process, the four boys discovered a cave that had been right below their feet for the past 17,000 years. They were not able to venture down into the 250-meter deep cave on the first day so they came back the next day prepared to enter the cave. When the boys first wiggled their way down into the cave they did not find anything. It was not until they reached an oval room that they first discovered paintings on the walls. These boys had uncovered paintings dating back to the Aurignacian (30,000-18,000 B.C.E.) (Laming, 34-41) and Magdalenian (15,000-10,000 B.C.E.) periods. It is believed that many of the paintings found in Lascaux were created between 16,000 and 14,000 B.C.E. The boys could no longer keep this cave a secret, so they told one of their teachers, Monsieur Laval. After accompanying the boys down to the cave, M. Laval started alerting historians to this new discovery. Within five days three historians were already on their way to visit the site. On September 17, 1940 three experts on Paleolithic art, Abbé Breuil, Dr. Cheynier and Abbé Bouyssonnie, crawled down into the cave; it was at this point the cave became authenticated.
Once the British and Ottoman allied troops defeated the French on Egyptian soil, terms of surrender were written for France by Britain. “The Articles of Capitulation of Alexandria, signed in 1801 was the result: Article 16 stipulated that all treasures recovered by the French in their three-year stay were to be handed over to the British (“Returning the Rosetta..” Downs).” This is how the Rosetta Stone found its way into Britain where it has been held on display since 1802.
The very first breakthrough of deciphering the writings Linear A and Linear B came during the 1950’s when archaeologists named Alice Kober created a method of deciding the grammatical relationship between the symbols in Linear B. In her conclusion Kober determined that the symbols in Linear B depicted syllables instead of letters. Some of the scripts that the archaeologists found during the 20th century came from Ancient Greece, notably Mycenae, Pylos, and also Knossos which is on the island of Crete. The scripts had been encoded with Linear B writings on clay tablets. These scripts had about 90 different characters on them. Later after discovering these scripts an archeologist named Michael Ventris would be the first to decipher these writings. Ventris compared the writings from the mainland Greece to those form Crete. Certain symbols and words appeared on the Cretan texts but did not on the Greek ones. Michael Ventris then made a hypothesis that the words on the scripts were names of cities and place names in Crete. With these names Ventris was able to uncover much of the language. In conclusion, Ventris determined that the language of Linear B was Greek.
White, John B. Afterword. Stonehenge Decoded. By Gerald S. Hawkins. New York: Doubleday, 1965. 191-197.
One could very well conclude that the Egyptians of the northern kingdom were critical thinkers in order to discover this intricate technique that forever left a lasting impact on mankind and his ability to pass on knowledge for future generations. We would later discover just how much the papyrus plant was important to later Egyptian creations during the unification, such as the creation of the Mdw-Ntr (Hieroglyphic) writing system—imagine having a writing system with nothing practical in everyday life to write on. Although stones were carved into, the papyrus plant would have made it easier for scribes to pass on more information at a time.
It is also interesting to see the petroglyphs all over the place that would arouse the curiosity of history fanatics as to who and when they were made.
Sumerians created writing in 3200 B.C., which at the time, was used for recording and communication. However, from 10,000- 40,000 B.C., cave paintings...
One thing that sparked my curiosity, was how all of the ancient civilizations used hieroglyphics or symbols to communicate in writing. Today, many countries and cultures do not. They use the letters for their words and phrases. In fact, hieroglyphics is not really used in any place. The closest thing is probably Hebrew and Arabic which were derived from the ancient civilizations.
Furthermore, the historical aspect of the translation is very important for the evolution of the translation, this, helps and