Everything about The Rosetta Stone totally explained
The
Rosetta Stone is an
Ancient Egyptian
artifact (حجر رشيد in Arabic) which was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of
hieroglyphic writing. The stone is a
Ptolemaic era stele with carved text. The text is made up of three translations of a single passage, written in two
Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and
Demotic), and in
classical Greek. It was created in
196 BC, discovered by the French in 1799 at
Rosetta, a harbour on the Mediterranean coast in Egypt, and contributed greatly to the decipherment of the principles of hieroglyphic writing in 1822 by the British polymath
Thomas Young and the French scholar
Jean-François Champollion. Comparative translation of the stone assisted in understanding many previously
undecipherable examples of
hieroglyphic writing. The text of the Rosetta Stone is a decree from
Ptolemy V, describing the repealing of various taxes and instructions to erect statues in temples.
The Stone is high at its tallest point, wide, and thick. Weighing approximately, it was originally thought to be
granite or
basalt but is currently described as
granodiorite and is dark blue-pinkish-grey in color. The stone has been on public display at
The British Museum since
1802.
History
Creation
The Rosetta Stone is a well-known example from a series of
decrees, the
Ptolemaic Decrees, issued by the
Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled
Egypt from 305 BC to 30 BC. The series consists of the
Decree of Canopus by
Ptolemy III,
Decree of Memphis, (as represented by the Memphis Stele) by
Ptolemy IV, and the Rosetta Stone decree by
Ptolemy V. Copies of the Ptolemaic Decrees were erected in several temple
courtyards, as the decrees specified.
Modern-era Discovery
After
Napoleon's 1798
conquest of Egypt, the French founded Institut de l'Égypte in
Cairo, bringing 167 scientists and archaeologists to the region.
French Army engineer
Captain Pierre-François Bouchard discovered the stone sometime in mid-July 1799 (the sources are unfortunately not more specific), while guiding construction work at Fort Julien near the Egyptian port city of
Rosetta (now Rashid). The Napoleonic army was so awestruck by this unheralded spectacle that, according to a witness, "it halted of itself and, by one spontaneous impulse, grounded its arms." (As quoted by Robert Claiborne,
The Birth of Writing [1974], p. 24.) He understood that it was important and showed it to General
Jacques de Menou. They sent it to the
Institut de l'Égypte, where it arrived in August. The
French language newspaper
Courrier de l'Egypte announced the find in September.
After Napoleon returned to France in 1799, 167 scholars remained behind with French troops which held off British and Ottoman attacks. In March 1801, the British landed on
Aboukir Bay and scholars carried the Stone from Cairo to Alexandria alongside the troops of de Menou. French troops in Cairo
capitulated on June 22, and in Alexandria on August 30.
After the surrender, a dispute arose over the fate of French archaeological and scientific discoveries in Egypt. De Menou refused to hand them over, claiming that they belonged to the Institute. British General
John Hely-Hutchinson, 2nd Earl of Donoughmore, refused to relieve the city until de Menou gave in. Newly arrived scholars
Edward Daniel Clarke and
William Richard Hamilton agreed to check the collections in Alexandria and found many artifacts that the French hadn't revealed.
When Hutchinson claimed all materials as a property of the
British Crown, a French scholar
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, said to Clarke and Hamilton that they'd rather burn all their discoveries, ominously referring to the burned
Library of Alexandria. Hutchinson finally agreed that items such as the biology specimens would be the scholars' private property. De Menou regarded the stone as his private property and hid it.
How exactly the Stone came to British hands is disputed. Colonel
Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who escorted the stone to Britain, claimed later that he'd personally seized it from de Menou and carried it away on a
gun carriage. Clarke stated in his memoirs that a French scholar and an officer had quietly given up the stone to him and his companions in a Cairo back street. French scholars departed later with only imprints and plaster casts of the stone.
Turner brought the stone to Britain aboard the captured French
frigate L'Egyptienne in February 1802. On March 11, it was presented to the
Society of Antiquaries of London. Later it was taken to the
British Museum, where it remains. White painted inscriptions on the artifact state "Captured in Egypt by the
British Army in 1801" on the left side and "Presented by
King George III" on the right.
Translation
In 1814, the Briton
Thomas Young finished translating the enchorial (
demotic) text, and began work on the
hieroglyphic script. From 1822 to 1824,
Jean-François Champollion greatly expanded on this work, and he's known as the translator of the Rosetta Stone. Champollion could read both Greek and
Coptic, and figured out what the seven Demotic signs in Coptic were. By looking at how these signs were used in Coptic, he worked out what they meant. Then he traced the Demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs. By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he made educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs meant.
In 1858, the
Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania published the first complete English translation of the Rosetta Stone. Three undergraduate members, Charles R Hale, S Huntington Jones, and Henry Morton, made the translation. The translation quickly sold out two editions and was internationally hailed as a monumental work of scholarship. In 1988, the British Museum bestowed the honor of including the Philomathean Rosetta Stone Report in its select bibliography of the most important works ever published on the Rosetta Stone. The Philomathean Society maintains a full-scale mold of the stone in its meeting room at the
University of Pennsylvania.
Recent History
The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited almost continuously in the British Museum since 1802. Toward the end of
World War I, in 1917, the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London and moved the Rosetta Stone to safety along with other portable objects of value. The Stone spent the next two years in a station on the
Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below the ground at Holborn.
The Stone left the
British Museum again in October 1972 to be exhibited for one month at the
Louvre Museum on the 150th anniversary of the
decipherment of
hieroglyphic writings with the famous
Lettre a M Dacier of
Jean-François Champollion.
In July 2003, Egypt demanded the return of the Rosetta Stone. Dr.
Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the
Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo, told the press: "If the British want to be remembered, if they want to restore their reputation, they should volunteer to return the Rosetta Stone because it's the icon of our Egyptian identity." In 2005, Hawass was negotiating for a three-month loan, with the eventual goal of a permanent return. In November 2005, the British Museum sent him a replica of the stone.
Abbreviated-synopsis in English (eighth of text)
The complete Greek text, in English,
(External Link
) is about 1600–1700 words in length, and is about 20 paragraphs long (average 80 words/paragraph).
Idiomatic use
The term
Rosetta Stone has become
idiomatic as something that's a critical key to a process of decryption or translation of a difficult problem. For example, "the Rosetta Stone of immunology" and "
Arabidopsis, the Rosetta Stone of flowering time (fossils)".
Under
Unix a Rosetta Stone is a document which places similar commands from different dialects (and offspring) of Unix side by side. It is very helpful if one has a solid knowledge of one dialect of Unix and needs to quickly find out how a common task is performed on another.
An algorithm for predicting
protein structure from sequence is named
Rosetta@home. It makes its predictions by looking at existing protein structure data.
"Rosetta" is also of a "lightweight dynamic translator" distributed for Mac OS X by
Apple. Rosetta enables applications compiled for a
RISC processor (
PowerPC) to run on Apple systems using a
CISC (
x86) processor.
Rosetta Stone (software) is also a brand of language learning software.
In molecular biology, a series of "Rosetta" bacterial cell lines have been developed that contain a number of
tRNA genes that are rare in E. coli but common in other organisms, enabling the efficient translation of
DNA from those organisms in E. coli.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Rosetta Stone'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://rosetta_stone.totallyexplained.com">Rosetta Stone Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
