Rosetta Stone (redirected from Rosetta inscription)

Rosetta Stone: see under Rosetta.

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Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone, with Egyptian hieroglyphs in the top section, demotic characters in the middle, …

(credit: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum)

Inscribed stone slab, now in the British Museum, that provided an important key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. An irregularly shaped block of black basalt with inscriptions in hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Greek, it was discovered by Napoleon's troops near the town of Rosetta (Rashid), northeast of Alexandria, in 1799. The text concerns the deeds of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205–180 BC) and dates from the ninth year of his reign. Its decipherment was begun by Thomas Young, who isolated the proper names in the Demotic version, and decisively completed by J.-F. Champollion, who grasped that some hieroglyphs were phonetic.

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Rosetta Stone

inscribed in three languages; key to hieroglyphics. [Fr. Hist.: Brewer Dictionary, 935]

See : Discovery

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Rosetta Stone

a basalt slab with identical inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphics and demotic writing and in Greek. It was discovered in 1799 by the Frenchman Bouchard (Bous-sard), an officer of the French Army in Egypt, during the construction of Fort St. Julien, near Rosetta (Rashid) on the western arm of the Nile in the Nile delta. The stone is now in London’s British Museum. The texts were inscribed in 196 B. C. by Egyptian priests and represent an expression of thanks to Ptolemy V Epiphanes, who ruled from 204 B.C. to 180 B.C. Attempts to decipher the Egyptian texts were undertaken by the French orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy, the Swedish diplomat J. D. Akerblad, and the English physicist T. Young. The hieroglyphic text was deciphered by J.-F. Champollion in 1822, thus marking the beginning of the study of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

REFERENCE

Livshits, I. G. “Deshifrovka egipetskikh ieroglifov Shampol’onom.” In J.-F. Champollion, O egipetskom ieroglificheskom alfavite. Leningrad, 1950. (Translated from French.)