The Rosetta Stone
In 1799, a group of French scholars encountered this famous slab of stone which was found by a troop of French soldiers stationed at Fort Julien in the town of Rosetta in the Nile delta. The Rosetta stone was discovered in a cave in Rosetta, Egypt. This was the piece of evidence where all the understanding of Egyptian writing comes. They identified there were three different scripts on the stone- the bottom section being in Ancient Greek, the centre in the Egyptian demotic script and the top in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. It took many years to decipher the symbols and what they meant but finally in 1822 a French scholar, Jean-Francois Champollion used his knowledge of Ancient Greek to become the first person to work out how to decode Egyptian writing. His work was an important breakthrough in the translation of Ancient hieroglyphs. The three scripts contained essentially the same text (with minor differences between them) and when it was known the inscriptions contained royal names such as Ptolemy, their equivalents in hieroglyphs could be found. From this information, the hieroglyphs making other words were worked out and the text was gradually deciphered. This breakthrough was essential as when the last temple was closed in the 6th century AD, the skill of reading hieroglyphs was lost until the discovery of this stone. Now historians can read texts and scrolls written by scribes who lived in Ancient Egypt. There are now many translations and replicas of the Rosetta Stone but at the moment it is at the British Museum and tourists from all around the world come to see it.
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