The Rosetta Stone

Grey /Pink Granodiorite | Ptolemaic Period | 196 BC

A valuable key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs

the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation .

The decree is inscribed on the stone three times , in hieroglyphic , demotic ( native script used for daily purposes) and Greek ( the language of the administration ) . the importance of this to Egyptology is immense .

Soon after the end of forth 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 , some 1400 years later , scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them .

Thomas Young , an English physicist , was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name , that of Ptolemy . The french scholar Jean- Francois Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture .

It was discovered by luck in 1799 , while soldiers in Napoleon's army while digging the foundation of an addition to a fort near the town of el Rashid (Rosetta) . on Napoleon's defeat the stone became the property of The British under terms of the Treaty of Alexandria 1801 along with other antiquities that the French had found .

The Rosetta stone has been exhibited in the British museum since 1802