The Rosetta Stone is part of a granitoid stela, originally about six feet in
height which was set up in March, 196 BC. It is a copy of a decree passed by
a general council of priests which assembled at Memphis on the first anniversary
of the coronation of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, king of all Egypt. The text concerns
the honours bestowed on the king by temples of Egypt in return for services
rendered by him to Egypt both at home and abroad. Priestly privileges, especially
those of an economic nature, are listed in detail.
The stone was discovered in 1799 when some French soldiers in Napoleon's army
were digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of Rashid
(Rosetta) in the Nile delta. The stone was subsequently ceded to the British
government by the terms of the treaty of Alexandria in 1801 and has been exhibited
in the British Museum since 1802.
The immediate importance of the Rosetta Stone lay in the fact that the Egyptian
hieroglyphic text was accompanied by the Greek translation which could be read.
A third inscription on the stone was written in Demotic, a cursive script developed
late in Egyptian history and used in most cases only for secular documents.
Thus the stone displayed the same text in three scripts, but only two languages,
Egyptian and Greek.
The Egyptians used the hieroglyphic script for nearly 3,500 years, beginning in
about 3300 BC until the end of the fourth century AD. At about the start of the
third century AD, the Egyptians began to write their languages in a script composed
of the Greek alphabet, to which were added seven characters derived ultimately
from hieroglyphs. In this form the language came to be known as Coptic, a corruption
of the Greek word for 'Egypt', Aiguptios. Knowledge of how to read and write the
hieroglyphic script was probably lost soon after it had been superseded and no
key to its meaning was found until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
The Greek inscription was used by scholars as the key to the decipherment of the
hieroglyphs in the first section. Thomas Young, the English Physicist, was the
first to prove that the elongated ovals or cartouches in the hieroglyphic section
of the stone contained a royal name written phonetically, in this case that of
Ptolemy. The French scholar J-F Champollion went on to correct and enlarge Young's
list of phonetic hieroglyphs and lay the foundations of our knowledge of the
ancient Egyptian language in a paper read to the Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-lettres in Paris in 1822.
The Rosetta Stone is exhibited at the southern entrance to the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery (Room 4).
What does
the Rosetta Stone Say?
The Rosetta stone is dated to March 196 BC, in the 9th year of Ptolemy V.
The background to the setting up of the stela was the confirmation of the
control of the Ptolemaic kings over Egypt. The Ptolemies were Greeks who had
been ruling Egypt since the fragmentation of the Empire of Alexander the Great,
and while they built temples in the Egyptian style, their lifestyle and language
remained exclusively Greek. Egypt had by now become a multi-cultural society,
a mixture of Greek and Egyptian, although in many parts of the country the two rarely met.
In the years preceding the setting up of the Rosetta Stone, control of certain
parts of Egypt had been lost to the family of the Ptolemies, and it had taken
the Ptolemaic armies some time to put down opposition in the Delta; parts of
southern Upper Egypt, particularly Thebes, were not yet back in the control of
the government. It appears that it was decided that the best way to emphasise
the legitimacy of the 13 year old Ptolemy V in the eyes of the Egyptian elite
was to re-emphasise his traditional royal credentials with a coronation ceremony
in the city of Memphis, and to affirm his royal cult throughout Egypt.
This second aim was done through a series of priestly decrees, of which
the Rosetta Stone is by far the best-known example. It is a version of the
decree issued at the city of Memphis; other decrees include the Canopus decree
in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The inscription begins with praise of Ptolemy, and then includes an account of
the siege of the city of Lycopolis (a town in the Delta, not identified with
certainty), and the good deeds done by the king for the temples. The final part
of the text describes the decree's overriding purpose, the establishment of the
cult of the king. For example, it stipulates how the priests shall maintain the
cult of the king ('...the priests shall pay homage three times a day...'), how
the king's shrine is to be set up ('...there shall be set upon the shrine the
ten gold crowns of the king...'), and days when certain festivals, such as the
king's birthday, shall be celebrated. It ends by saying that it is to be made
known that all the men of Egypt should magnify and honour Ptolemy V, and that
the text should be set up in hard stone in the three scripts which the Rosetta
Stone still bears today (hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek).
In pre-Ptolemaic times, decrees in hieroglyphs such as this were usually set
up by the king, and it is an interesting indication of how far things had
changed from Pharaonic times that the priests, the only people still with the
knowledge of writing hieroglyphs, were now publishing 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, and how the fusion of Greek and Egyptian
cultures was managed.
