The Rosetta Stone
—Christina

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            Egyptian hieroglyphics are one of the few written languages which is fairly static. Because it wasn’t used in day-to-day life, but kept for important governmental and religious texts, the meaning of the symbols had little opportunity or need to change over the five thousand years since they was first used. Unfortunately, that same limited usage meant that once they’d been replaced by other writing systems, they could more easily be forgotten. The last hieroglyphic inscription known was made in the fifth century CE, at a time when they had already fallen out of use. If any translation dictionaries of hieroglyphics to other languages ever existed, they have been lost.

            By the time we come to the late 18th century, when the Rosetta Stone was found, the potential meaning of the symbols was a source of debate amongst Egyptologists, both professional and amateur. Attempts to decipher the languages had been going on since at least the 9th century, but worked from the assumption that the symbols were ideograms, representing complete words or phrases, not phonetic characters representing sounds. As it turned out, both interpretations were correct: hieroglyphs can be read phonetically or as full words, depending upon context. No one could be sure, however, without a bilingual example for translation. This is where the Rosetta Stone comes in: it is a large fragment of a stele with a decree from Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanies, written in 196 BCE. The stele was designed so that all of the people who were literate in at least one of the local languages could read it, with the same text provided in Greek (the language of the Ptolemies), Demotic Egyptian (the commonly used text at the time), and hieroglyphics. Translating the ancient Greek was not a problem, this was at time at which that was still a standard part of many university curriculums. Demotic had, like hieroglyphs, fallen out of use in the Early Middle Ages, but was found more commonly and was in the process of being deciphered when the Stone was found. Using these two as a guide, the meaning of the third, hieroglyphic, portion could be worked out.

            The stone itself was found accidentally, by French soldiers who were reinforcing the city of Rosetta (modern Rashid) for Napoleon. The French held it for a short time, but it was taken by the English after Napoleon’s defeat in 1801. It was put on display at the British Museum the next year, but not before plaster casts and lithographs were made of the text to be disseminated all over Europe in hopes of translating the Demotic and hieroglyphs. A publication of the Greek translation was made in 1803, but it took until 1822 for the Demotic and the hieroglyphs to be worked out. They key discovery came with the recognition that some of the symbols, particularly the names, were “spelled” phonetically amidst ideograms. There are still hieroglyphs whose meaning we don’t know, but Egyptologists and linguists have been able to use what we learned from the Rosetta Stone translation to figure out the translation of many other hieroglyphic texts.

            Because of its importance to Egyptology and to the understanding of languages as a whole, the Rosetta Stone has become synonymous with learning and translating languages.