The Rosetta Stone
196 BC
A slab of dark grey stone, broken at the top and on one side, is covered with three bands of closely packed writing. At the top are Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the middle is Demotic, the everyday script of Egypt, and at the bottom is ancient Greek. All three carry the same text: a decree issued by priests gathered at Memphis in one hundred and ninety six BC, praising the young king Ptolemy the Fifth on the first anniversary of his coronation and granting him a cult in every temple. The stone stood in a temple so that everyone, priest, official and Greek ruler alike, could read it.
The Greek text was the key. Scholars could read Greek, and once they knew what the stone said they could begin to match names such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra in the cartouches of the hieroglyphs. Thomas Young in England made the first advances, and Jean-Francois Champollion in France announced the decipherment in eighteen twenty two, proving that hieroglyphs recorded sounds as well as ideas. Look closely at the surface: the letters were once filled with white chalk to make them legible to visitors, and the pink granite veins show through the grey. On the left edge you can still read a painted inscription recording its capture by the British army.
French soldiers found the stone in seventeen ninety nine while rebuilding a fort at Rashid, or Rosetta, in the Nile Delta during Napoleon's expedition. When the French surrendered in eighteen oh one it was handed over to the British under the terms of the treaty, and it arrived here in eighteen oh two, where it has been on display almost continuously ever since, longer than any other object. Egypt has asked for its return. It remains the museum's most visited object and the reason we can read the words of the pharaohs at all.
Did You Know? During the First World War the stone spent two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway fifteen metres below Holborn to protect it from bombing.
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