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The Rosetta Stone, discovered in Egypt in 1799, is a black basalt slab with an inscription in three alphabets. It helped decipher hieroglyphics, which had fallen out of use by the 4th century AD, and was translated by French linguist Jean François Champollion in 1822.
The Rosetta Stone is a slab of black basalt carved with an inscription in three alphabets. It was discovered in 1799 near the city of Rosetta in Egypt. While working to restore old fortresses for Napoleon’s invading army, Captain Pierre-François Bouchard discovered the stone and recognized it as a valuable linguistic clue.
The Rosetta Stone was originally carved in 196 BC, during the reign of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The stone is typical of the period, when complementary inscriptions praising the Pharaoh for his virtues were common. Since Egypt had recently been conquered by the Greeks, the Rosetta Stone inscription was written in both Egyptian and Greek. The Egyptian part was written in both Demotic – a common, everyday type of alphabet – and older, more formal hieroglyphs.
The Ptolemic pharaohs were all descendants of General Lagus, a friend and ally of the conqueror Alexander the Great. Therefore, they were ethnically Greek rather than Egyptian. At the time of the inscription of the Rosetta Stone, both Greek and Egyptian languages were in use in Egypt. Interestingly, Alexander the Great is buried in the Egyptian city that bears his name, Alexandria.
When Egypt became a vassal state of the Roman Empire, ruled by a Roman governor, hieroglyphs fell out of use and by the 4th century AD the writing system was lost. At the time of the rediscovery of the Rosetta Stone, the hieroglyphics were indecipherable. Some people even thought they weren’t a language at all, but an iconic form of decoration. With the Rosetta Stone it was possible to decipher demotic from Greek, and then hieroglyphics from demotic.
The Rosetta Stone was translated and deciphered by Jean François Champollion, a French linguist of extraordinary ability. He began work on the translation in 1808, when he was eighteen, and in 1822 he published his own translation of the Rosetta Stone. His breakthrough was in realizing that the images that made up hieroglyphics were used not only as images to represent ideas, but also as letters to represent specific sounds, just like American Sign Language. Thus words could be spelled out which had no pictorial representation in the alphabet. Individuals’ proper names were spelled out this way, and names were differentiated from other texts by being enclosed in a rectangle with rounded corners, called a cartouche.
Once the Rosetta Stone had led to the translation of the hieroglyphs, all the inscriptions in ancient Egypt’s myriad tombs and monuments were legible again.
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