The Rosetta Stone- key to understand the original ancient Kemet Language -Hieroglyphics

The key to translating Hieroglyphics

1. In July 1799, a group of French soldiers during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt found the stone in the City of Rosetta (modern el Rashid) Rosetta was located on the tributary of the Nile.
2. The French looting soldiers while digging to loot found and stole the Rosetta Stone (four feet long and two and half feet wide) from Ancient Egypt.
3. When the British defeated Napoleon in 1801 they took possession of the stolen rosetta stone, and it became the property of British under the treaty of Alexandria (1801.
4. Today it is housed in the British Museum London.
5. This Stone was the key understanding the Ancient Kemet (present day Egypt) hieroglyphics a script made up of small pictures that was used originally in ancient Egypt for religious text etc.

Who broke the Code of the Stone

1. French Jean-Francois Champollion helped to deciphering the Rosetta stone and cracked the hieroglyphics code.
2. The Rosetta Stone was written in three scripts (languages) used in ancient Egypt.
3. The three scripts were written in Hieroglyphics, Demotic and Greek and all meant the same.
4. The first script is in Hieroglyphics commonly used for religious/priestly document.
5. The second script was Demotic the common daily script of Egypt.
6. The third Greek language spoken by the invaders.
7.  The scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to deciphering the others.
8. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion deciphering of the three languages laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language, civilisation, and culture etc.
9. The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited in the British Museum since 1802.

Towards the end of the First World War, in 1917, when the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London, they moved it to safety along with other, portable, ‘important’ objects. The Rosetta Stone spent the next two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below the ground at Holborn.

Additional resources:

A.K. Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs: 332 BC–AD 642; From Alexander to the Arab Conquest (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996).

C.A.R. Andrews, The Rosetta Stone (London, The British Museum Press, 1982).

C.A.R. Andrews and S. Quirke, The Rosetta Stone: facsimile drawing (London, The British Museum Press, 1988).

R. Parkinson, The Rosetta Stone (London, British Museum Press, 2005).

R. Parkinson, Cracking codes: the Rosetta Stone and decipherment (London, The British Museum Press, 1999).