The Rosetta Stone

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The Rosetta Stone

• Found in 1799 near the town of Rosetta (Rashid in
  Arabic) by French Engineers during Napoleon's
  occupation of Egypt. After the French surrendered
  Alexandria to the English in 1801, the stone
  became English property, and has been on display
  in the British Museum since 1802.
• The identical text is carved into the black
  basalt stele fragment in three scripts (1)
  Hieroglyphic (2) Demotic and (3) Greek. The
  text is a decree of Egyptian priests assembled at
  Memphis of the goodness of 14 year-old Ptolemy V
  Epiphanes, who ruled from 204 to 180 BCE.

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Where is Rosetta?
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The Scripts of the Rosetta Stone

• Hieroglyphics etymologically sacred carved
  letters (Greek) the script used by priests to
  write religious documents. Individual characters
  are called hieroglyphs. When first viewed on the
  Rosetta Stone, some scholars believed these
  hieroglyphs to be nothing more than decorations!
  It is the most incomplete of the stones scripts.
• Demotic later cursive form of hieroglyph that
  became the standard script of everyday Egypt it
  resembles Coptic script (the Coptic language,
  although now extinct, was the form of the ancient
  Egyptian language spoken during early Christian
  times that was replaced by Arabic following the
  establishment of Islamic hegemony in Egypt).
• Greek language spoken by Egyptian rulers when
  the stone was carved in 196 BCE. Remember that
  this was the era of the Ptolemiesthe descendents
  of the Greek regent who had been given charge
  over Alexanders Egyptian Empire after his death.
  This script was immediately readable and provided
  the date and origin of the carvings.

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Script Comparisons

• Building mainly on the work of Thomas Young and
  knowing both Coptic and Greek, the Frenchman
  Champollion assumed that the hieroglyphics
  contained in each cartouche (royal rings)
  represented the name of the king. He compared the
  individual hieroglyphs with the corresponding
  Greek (Ptolemy) and demotic and began to
  construct the hieroglyphic alphabet.

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Champollion and the three scripts

• The key is Champollions conclusion that Demotic
  and Coptic were essentially the same language,
  differing only in the alphabet used (Coptic is
  based on the Greek alphabet). He applied his
  knowledge of Coptic to the transliteration of the
  Demotic script and identified specific matching
  verbiage (i.e., letters and words) in all three
  scripts.
• Thus came Champollions key realization (c. 1820)
  that hieroglyphics is not a pictorial/symbolic
  language in which every symbol stands for an
  entire wordbut rather a phonetic language based
  on an alphabet (ISPHow specifically did he
  demonstrate this?). This was similar to Youngs
  thinking, and the debate regarding who deserves
  primary credit for this idea still produces
  scholarly debate.
• In addition to Ptolemy, he recognized the name
  Kliopadra in both the Greek and Hieroglyphic
  texts (in the royal cartouche) and then read from
  the Greek to the hieroglyphic letter for letter.
• Together, Ptolemys and Kliopadragave him a
  twelve-letter foundation for a hieroglyphic
  alphabet. This alphabet consisted of 24
  consonant hieroglyphic signs. Vowels were spoken
  but unwritten this makes the actual
  pronunciation unknown although some scholarly
  reconstruction has taken place based on Coptic
  phonetics.

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And so

•         The English Alphabet could be translated
  into hieroglyphics.
•         A new, enthusiastic era of Egyptology
  was ushered in that lead to fantastic discoveries
  (e.g., Tuts tomb by Howard Carter in 1922).
•         The hieroglyphic burial texts that
  envelop sarcophagi and tomb walls became
  readable, as was the Book of the Dead and
  hieroglyphic secular writings such as
  autobiographies and chronologies. The dates of
  the Pharaonic Dynasties and kingdoms (i.e.,
  Old/Middle/New) were better established.
•         Historical inscriptions on great
  monuments (e.g., Thutmose III defeating his
  enemies as depicted on the Temple of Amun-Re at
  Karnak) are now interpretable. Most surviving
  records come from the New Kingdom, and many
  historical inscriptions on stela, walls, and
  columns were determined to be propaganda, not
  objective history.
•        Administrative Documents can be read.
  These shed light on priestly duties and temple
  management, trials of grave robbers, medical
  veterinary treatment, wills other legal
  documents, and narratives of great construction
  and social order.
•         Expedition records, wisdom philosophic
  literature, stories Egyptian legends are now
  accessible to us.

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And finally

• Hieroglyphic script fell out of use during the
  4th and 5th centuries CE. Alexander conquered
  Egypt in 332 BCE, thus leading to an influx of
  Greek settlers and the gradual domination of
  Greek over hieroglyphic writing (which gradually
  became restricted to religious themes). Temples
  using hieroglyphics continued to be built, but it
  was a language that few could read and bore no
  resemblance to the speech of that era. The
  deathblow to hieroglyphics came with the
  Christianization of Egypt. The last dated
  hieroglyph is 394 CE, about 80 years after Egypt
  became Christian. Subsequent writing was either
  Greek or Coptic, and so the Dark Ages of
  Egyptology had begun.

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The Hieroglyph Alphabet
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Now, Write YOUR Name in Hieroglyphics!
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Be careful about internet sources.

• http//www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/hieroglyph/hi
  eroglyph5.html