Why Was the Rosetta Stone a Useful Discovery?
Imagine finding a master key that opens a series of locked doors, some of which have been locked for centuries. Like a master key, the Rosetta Stone--a black stone of volcanic rock that stands some 3 feet 9 inches tall, 2 feet 4 1/2 inches wide and 11 inches thick--was useful in that it gave scholars the tool to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, the meanings of which had become lost to time.
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History
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After the stone was discovered by French soldiers in 1799, it was named for the Nile Valley town in which it was found: Rashid, or, translated, Rosetta. Three bands of writing covered the stone, Greek, Egyptian demotic and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Large chunks of the stone were missing from the top and bottom bands.
A Band of Greek
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Scholars of the late 1700s and early 1800s could understand and read the Greek, a language used along with Egyptian during the Ptolemaic dynasty when Egypt was heavily influenced by Greek culture. The other two bands of writing chiseled in the stone proved to be more of a mystery. The Greek language would be an important clue to deciphering the other two bands.
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Egyptian Demotic
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Because the middle section of the stone was the most complete, scholars attempted to confront it first, using the section of Greek at the bottom of the Rosetta Stone as a guide. They compared repeated words and proper nouns, such as "Ptolemy" and "Cleopatra," and looked for matching numbers of occurrences of these types of words in both the middle (demotic) and upper band (hieroglyphics).
Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion
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The two scholars who were most responsible for deciphering the Egyptian demotic and hieroglyphs were Thomas Young, a British master of languages, and Jean-Francois Champollion, a French scholar. Champollion realized that the hieroglyphs, as well as the demotic, were based on units of sounds rather than ideas, as had been mistakenly thought. In 1822, he experienced this breakthrough, and could then decipher all of the writings on the stone.
Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Demotic
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After the discovery that led to understanding the Egyptian hieroglyphs and demotic writing, scholars determined that the demotic language was a type of shorthand hieroglyphics, used for business dealings and everyday writing, while hieroglyphs were primarily used on monuments and in religious works.
What the Stone Says
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The Rosetta Stone, chiseled in Ancient Egypt in 196 B.C.E, describes the repealing of taxes by the pharaoh at the time, Ptolemy V, and contains the praises of priests who honored the pharaoh for his beneficence. Scholars agree that while the information contained in the writing on the stone is fairly boring, "cracking the code" of the ancient languages carved upon it has proved immeasurably important over the years.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit Rosetta Stone (www.pdphoto.org)
