I learned this today. The Rosetta stone helped translate hieroglyphics because it had the same message written in hieroglyphics, the cursive Egyptian script for regular people called demotic, and ancient Greek.
The Rosetta stone is a large slab of granodiorite that probably stood in a temple. It has a decree written on it that concerns King Ptolemy V, who reigned from 204 to 180 BC. The stone is broken, and a lot of the script has been lost. The decree would have been copied and placed in all the major temples of Egypt. It says that the priests in a temple of Memphis (in Egypt) support the king. The Rosetta stone was just a copy of this decree and not an important document, but it had other value.
The Rosetta stone was found in the town of Rosetta by Napoleon Bonaparte’s army in 1799. Napoleon was campaigning in Egypt in order to take over the eastern Mediterranean and threaten Britain’s hold on India. While his troops were there, some of his soldiers found the stone while they were digging the foundations to extend the fort near Rosetta. The stone had been built into an old wall. Luckily, the officer in charge, Pierre-Francois Bouchard realized that what they had found was important. He was shipping it to France when Napoleon was defeated and the British confiscated most of the things that the French had taken from the Egyptians. The stone was shipped to England and arrived there in 1802.
Why was the Rosetta stone important?
Egyptians started writing with hieroglyphics sometime after 4000 BC. There are designs on pottery from 4000 BC that have images that closely resemble hieroglyphics. There are clay labels from the 33rd century BC that use proto-hieroglyphics, showing that the system of conveying words with images had begun. A seal impression on a tomb that was found, dated from the 28th century BC, has the earliest full sentence written in hieroglyphics, which would indicate that it was being used as a writing system long before this date.
Hieroglyphics continued to be used as a writing system in Egypt for almost three and a half thousand years. However, they were not easy to write, and they were used mainly for priestly and official writing. As more Egyptians became able to write, the difficult to write hieroglyphs gradually morphed into easier to write versions. This script is called demotic script, and it uses characters that represent the original hieroglyphs.
Egypt was conquered by the Persians in the 5th century BC. In 332 BC, it was conquered by Alexander the Great, and it was conquered by Rome in 31 BC. All of these changes, both political and cultural, led to a slow change in Egypt. The Greeks and the Romans thought that hieroglyphics were an allegorical system of secret, mystical knowledge. As Egypt was slowly converted to Christianity, the number of temples declined and the number of people writing in hieroglyphics also declined. By the 4th century AD, very few Egyptians could still read Hieroglyphics, and the last writing found in hieroglyphics was some graffiti carved into a temple wall in 394 AD. From then on, a writing system that had existed since 4000 BC, could no longer be read. It adorned monuments, temples, and buildings, yet nobody could read it.
In the Middle Ages, Arabic scholars tried to decipher it, but they were hindered because they thought that hieroglyphics recorded ideas, not sounds. There were many theories and ideas over the years, but there was no way to work out what the hieroglyphs meant. It was like a code that no longer has a key. Impossible to break. That is, until the Rosetta stone was found.
The Rosetta stone had the same message in the three writing systems that were being used in Egypt when it was written, in about 190 BC. Those were the official language of hieroglyphics, the common writing system of demotics, and the Ancient Greek, which had been spoken since Alexander the Great. Scholars who could read ancient Greek knew what the message said. This gave them a starting point. Several different people started to translate the Ancient Greek. It was difficult going because it was written using official Egyptian court jargon.
At the same time, a Swedish diplomat and a French orientalist were working on the demotic section. They tried to find where the names that appeared in the Greek script appeared in the demotic and they managed to identify five names. They managed to use this to decipher an alphabet of 29 letters.
The hieroglyphics were still proving to be uncrackable. Some of the hieroglyphics were in an oval, called a cartouche, and experts thought these were probably royal names, but they couldn’t read them. Until the French orientalist had a conversation with a Chinese student about how the Chinese writing system portrays foreign names using phonetic symbols. He realized that foreign names on the Rosetta stone might be written phonetically. The researchers found where the foreign names were in the Greek text (such as Ptolemaios), worked out where they probably were in the hieroglyphic text, and managed to read it. This showed them that the hieroglyphs were both ideas in themselves, and phonetic sounds. Over the next year, a rough alphabet of hieroglyphs was drawn up.
Hieroglyphs were not only deciphered from the Rosetta stone. It took many more years and a lot of other documents before people could read them completely, but the Rosetta stone provided the key that enabled the later work to start. If there had been no Rosetta stone, who knows when people would have been able to decipher them. Even modern computers wouldn’t have been able to do it without the external reference that the Rosetta stone provided.
So, hieroglyphics were a writing system that started in 4000 BC and died out in 394 AD. People forgot how to read them and they were indecipherable. In 1799, the Rosetta stone was found and it had the same text in Ancient Greek and hieroglyphics. Experts read the Ancient Greek and realized that the names were phonetically spelled out in hieroglyphics. This provided them with the key to start deciphering ancient Egyptian texts. And this is what I learned today.
Image By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3153928
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