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The History of the Rosetto Stone

Introduction

The Rosetta Stone is a granitoid slab inscribed in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek with identical texts of a decree by a council of priests during the reign of Ptolemy V.
Part of a stele dating from 196 B.C., it was found (1799) by Napoleon's troops near the city of el-Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt, was taken (1801) by the British, and since 1802 has been displayed at the British Museum. It gave Jean-François Champollion, Thomas Young and others the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The British Museum - information

The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests, one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation.

In previous years the family of the Ptolemies had lost control of certain parts of the country. It had taken their armies some time to put down opposition in the Delta, and parts of southern Upper Egypt, particularly Thebes, were not yet back under the government's control.

Before the Ptolemaic era (that is before about 332 BC), decrees in hieroglyphs such as this were usually set up by the king. It shows how much things had changed from Pharaonic times that the priests, the only people who had kept the knowledge of writing hieroglyphs, were now issuing such decrees. The list of good deeds done by the king for the temples hints at the way in which the support of the priests was ensured.

The decree is inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration). The importance of this to Egyptology is immense. Soon after the end of the fourth century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.

Signifigance of Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is inscribed in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek with identical texts of a decree by a council of priests during the reign of Ptolemy V. Ptolemy Epiphanes, d. 180 B.C., king of ancient Egypt (205-180 B.C.), of the Macedonian dynasty, son of Ptolemy IV. He succeeded to the throne as a small boy, and his reign began with disastrous civil wars. Invasions by Antiochus III of Syria and Philip V of Macedon cost Egypt all of Palestine and the Egyptian possessions in Asia Minor. Antiochus defeated Ptolemy decisively at the Battle of Panion in 200 B.C. Peace was confirmed by the marriage of Ptolemy to Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus. Egypt was much weakened when his reign ended. The Rosetta Stone inscriptions concern Ptolemy's reign and his relations with the priests.