Its surface is inscribed with a decree issued by a council of Egyptian priests on the anniversary of Ptolemy’s coronation.ĭespite the stone’s later significance, the text itself is relatively mundane, listing the king’s accomplishments before reminding readers of his divinity and affirming his royal cult. The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger slab erected at an Egyptian temple in 196 B.C.E., during the reign of Ptolemy V, a Ptolemaic king of Macedonian Greek ancestry. “It ended up taking 20 years.” What is the Rosetta Stone? “The first people to look at the Rosetta Stone thought it would take two weeks to decipher,” says Dolnick, author of The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone. In theory, the juxtaposed inscriptions should’ve been easy to decipher, as scholars at the time knew ancient Greek and could therefore piece together the hieroglyphic translation based on the Greek message. Dubbed the Rosetta Stone after the town where it was found, the stela fragment features versions of the same decree in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic (essentially a shorthand form of hieroglyphs) and ancient Greek. The key to this centuries-old dilemma was an unassuming slab of granodiorite unearthed in Egypt in July 1799. As Champollion revealed to a room of his peers nearly two weeks later, he’d solved one of history’s greatest mysteries: how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs and, by extension, unlock the secrets of the ancient civilization. (The scholar, says writer Edward Dolnick, was “an over-the-top, histrionic, melodramatic figure, always bursting with ecstasy or despondent in misery.”) But his reaction was also far from hyperbolic, considering the significance of the discovery in question. The dramatic nature of Champollion’s announcement was emblematic of his idiosyncratic character. According to popular lore, the philologist, or scholar of historical languages, only recovered from his fainting spell five days later. When Jean-François Champollion, a 31-year-old Frenchman who’d dedicated his life to the study of ancient Egypt, burst into his brother’s Paris office on September 14, 1822, he made an emphatic declaration-“ Je tiens mon affaire!” (“I’ve got it!”)-then promptly collapsed.
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