Discovery
The Rosetta Stone was discovered in August 1799 near a small town named Rashid. The town is traditionally called 'Rosetta' from which the name of the stone was derived. The town of Rashid is located on the left bank of a branch of the Nile in the western delta about 30 miles from Alexandria.

Thee man who discovered the stone was a Frenchman by the name of Bouchard or Boussard. He was conduction repairs to Fort St. Julien at Rashid on Napoleon's Expedition to Egypt. It is not known for certain whether the stone was found lying loose on the ground or had been chiselled out of a wall. It is known from the inscription of the stone that it was set up close to the gold statue of the Pharaoh within the temple, which would indicate that there was a temple of some size at the town of Rashid.
 

When the French surrendered Egypt to the British in 1801, the Rosetta Stone also passed into British hands. It is now on exhibition in the British Museum in London.

Description
The Rosetta stone is an irregularly shaped slab of black basalt which is about 3 ft. 9in. in length, 2 ft. 4 1/2 in. in width, and 11 inches in thickness. The top right and left hand corners are broken off as well as the bottom right hand corner. The pieces were never found, although a search was made for them. It is estimated that the actual complete size of the stone was about 18 to 24 inches longer than at present. It is thought that the complete Rosetta Stone would resemble in general form and appearance the other Stelae which were set up in honour of Ptolemy III, IV and V by the priesthood of Egypt assembled at Memphis and Canopus.

Inscriptions
The three inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone are two forms of Egyptian writing and one of Greek. The Rosetta Stone was written in three kinds of script but only two languages. The stone is bilingual and not trilingual. The scripts are Hieroglyphic, (14 lines), Egyptian Demotic (32 lines), and Koine Greek(54 lines). 

Hieroglyphic is a Greek word which means 'sacred writing'. This script is an old form of picture writing which dates back to the latter part of the 4th millennium B.C. It was used in making copies of funerary and religious texts, and nearly all state and ceremonial documents that were to be seen by the public. 

The Egyptian Demotic (Greek for 'people of the town') is the conventional, abbreviated, and modified form of the Hieratic character invented to write hieroglyphics much more rapidly. Its general use was for literary and commercial purposes. 

The Koine Greek was the language of the people which could be heard about the marketplace. The languages used seem to progress from common to technical as one goes from bottom to top. It may be that the purpose for the great diversity of scripts was for the communication of the high priestly decree to everyone.

Contents
The contents of this bilingual tablet commemorate ascension of Ptolemy V Epiphanes to the throne of Egypt in the year 197-196 B.C., in the ninth year of his reign. The decree summarises the benefits given by Ptolemy V to the priesthood and appears to have been written by priests at Memphis after a great 'General Council' of Egyptian priests from Upper and Lower Egypt. The benefits extend beyond the priesthood to also encompass the sailors, soldiers and civilians of Egypt. Examples of these benefits are gifts of corn and money to the temples, reductions of various taxes, the forgiveness of rebels and permission granted for them to return home, and a return of their property. A formation of an army and navy at the King's expense. In return, the priest records blessings of power, victory, life, health, strength and good things of every kind will be the King's from the gods and goddesses. The priests also added specific benefits which they had ordered. 

A statue of Ptolemy V as the 'Avenger of Egypt' should be set up side by side with a statue of the chief local god in the most prominent place in every temple in Egypt. Festive holidays, statues and additional titles were all given on behalf of the King. Finally, the decree was to be inscribed in the old Hieroglyphic character, in Demotic, and in Greek on a slab of hard, black basalt and a copy placed side by side with the image of the King in every temple of the first, second and third class in Egypt. To what extent this was carried out is not known.

Duplicates
Some of the copied tablets with the decree of the priests have been found. The most important of these is the Stele of Damanhur. (Or the Stele of Annobairah). It is 4 ft. 2 in. in height and nearly 1 ft. 8 in. in width with 31 lines of hieroglyphic text. A unique feature of this stone is an inscription above the writing of Ptolemy V spearing an enemy with a royal lady, a god, a lioness-headed goddess and figures of three of the Ptolemies and their Queens behind him. The Rosetta stone is thought to be very similar in decoration to the stelae set up in honor of Ptolemy III and IV.

Deciphering the Stones
Attempts to decipher the scripts from the stone before 1800 were unsuccessful, as the pictures were believed to be composed of mystic symbols. In 1802 some progress was made by the French scholar A. I. Silvestre de Sacy and the Swedish diplomat, Jean David Akerblad, when they identified a number of proper names in the Demotic text by comparing it with the Greek.

Further work was carried on by Thomas Young, an accomplished linguistic who discovered that the royal names were written within ovals called cartouches, and worked out from these a phonetic alphabet. In 1814, he established the way in which the birds and animals in the pictorial script faced. Difficulty came when he failed to recognise that the Demotic and hieroglyphic were paraphrases and not literal translations. As a result, not all of the characters lined up equally.

Jean Francois Champollion continued the work with the discovery that the hieroglyphic text was the translation of the Greek, not the reverse as had been thought. On September 17, 1822 Champollion read his Memoir on the hieroglyphics and exhibited his 'Hieroglyphic Alphabet', with its Greek and Demotic equivalents, before the Academy of Inscriptions. Champollion was assisted in his work when he had the opportunity to travel to Egypt and copy 2,000 pages of inscriptions in his own hand writing. Working from his meagre alphabet and skilfully applying his knowledge of Coptic and of the Rosetta stone, he successfully deciphered them.

Significance
The true significance of the Rosetta Stone cannot be estimated to a large extent by its content. What was described was not out of the ordinary for the Egyptian Pharaohs and priests. The true significance lies in the method used to communicate the contents. The bilingual message is the key to the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Until 1822 Egyptian History derived from inscriptions on the walls of tombs and tablets lay silent in a mystical sequence of fascinating pictures. This stone played a vital role in the initial decipherment of the ancient Egyptian writing systems.

The brilliant work of Jean Francois Champollion with the Rosetta Stone opened the way into the entire written history of ancient Egypt, covering 3000 years of history and civilisation, extremely valuable in the study of the humanities and for a background in Biblical studies.

The Rosetta Stone will long remain the most important discovery in Egyptian linguistics, and archaeologists will long be grateful for the light which it has shed on Egyptian History and culture as a result of its bilingual uniqueness.

Copyright © 1995 David Graves & Jane Graves, Electronic Christian Media