History Channel – Ancient Mysteries – The Rosetta Stone 1/5

The Rosetta Stone is an Ancient Egyptian artifact which was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. The stone is a Ptolemaic era stele with carved text made up of three translations of a single passage: two in Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic) and one in classical Greek. It was created in 196 BC, discovered by the French in 1799 at Rosetta and contributed greatly to the deciphering of the principles of hieroglyph writing in 1822 by the British scientist 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 on the stone is a decree from Ptolemy V, describing the repeal of various taxes and instructions to erect statues in temples. Two Egyptian-Greek multilingual steles predated Ptolemy V’s Rosetta Stone: Ptolemy III’s Decree of Canopus, 239 BC, and Ptolemy IV’s Decree of Memphis, ca 218 BC. The renaissance translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early 1800s promulgated the immediate three-language translation of the tri-lingual Behistun Inscription in cuneiform scripts, by scaffolding work on the cliff-wall face, before the mid-1800s. Both hieroglyphs and cuneiform were starting a translation revolution, as were the physical sciences of describing fossil evolution. The Rosetta Stone is 114.4 centimetres (45.0 in) high at its highest point, 72.3 centimetres (28.5 in …
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