July 19 - The Rosetta Stone is Discovered

This Day in History: 19 July 2020

 

19 July 1799

 

221 years ago, today, the Rosetta Stone was found by a French solider during Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign. When Napoleon invaded the nation in 1798, he took along a group of scholars, instructing them to seize all important cultural artifacts for France. Pierre Bouchard, one of the French soldiers, was aware of this when he found the stone. However, when the British defeated Napoleon in 1801, they took the Rosetta Stone into their own possession. The black slab was discovered near the town of Rosetta, near Alexandria, and was almost four feet long and two-and-a-half feet wide.

 

It contained fragments of passages written in the three different scripts of Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek inscribed on the stone told the archaeologists that the Rosetta Stone was from priests honouring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century. It also announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning, making the artifact key in solving the riddles of hieroglyphics. Several scholars made progress with the initial hieroglyphic analysis, but French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion was ultimately the person to decipher them. He used his self-taught knowledge of ancient languages as a guide. Once the inscriptions were translated, the language and culture of ancient Egypt was open to scientists as never before.

 

Want to find out more about the Rosetta Stone? Click here for more information, or here for more on the challenge of deciphering the inscriptions.