Rosetta Stone

[akritas]

Genuine advance was possible only when, in 1799, French troops in the
army of Napoleon found at Rosetta by the western mouth of the Nile the
stone inscription known as the Rosetta Stone ( Plate III ), which is
now in the British Museum. The inscription is bilingual (with two
languages, Egyptian and Greek), but, like the Persian royal
inscriptions, it is trigraphic, if we may coin the word to mean having
three scripts (two Egyptian, now known as hieroglyphic and demotic,
and one Greek). 6 It contains a decree of Egyptian priests passed in
196 B.C. to honor the coronation of the boy king Ptolemy V in 203 B.C.
and to record his good deeds. Copies of the decree were intended to be
placed in all the temples of Egypt, but perhaps this was not in fact
carried out. We do, however, possess one other copy of the complete
decree (a stele found at the Egyptian village of An-Nobairah), and we
know of a third, which was cut on the wall of the temple at Philae,
but was later much mutilated. The Rosetta Stone itself is damaged,
especially in the hieroglyphic text, where not a line is quite intact
and about half of the lines have been lost altogether.

The Greek text, it is surprising to note, appears to have been the one
in which the decree was first written, so that the Egyptian versions
are translations of it (and not always very close ones), rather than
vice versa. The Greek of course presented no particular difficulty to
translators. Work on the demotic text was begun in France in 1802 by
de Sacy and Akerblad, both of whom, with the aid of the Greek,
identified personal names in it, and the latter explained the
alphabetic value of many of the signs.

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