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Egyptian sculpture
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The Rosetta Stone
Egypt, Ptolemaic Period, 196 BC
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A valuable key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs, the inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree
passed by a council of priests. It is one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V
on the first anniversary
of his coronation.
In previous years the family of the Ptolemies had lost control of certain parts of the country. It had taken
their armies some time to put down opposition in the Delta, and parts of southern Upper Egypt,
particularly Thebes, were not yet back under the government's control.
Before the Ptolemaic era (that is before about 332 BC), decrees in hieroglyphs such as this were
usually set up by the king. It shows how much things had changed from Pharaonic times that the
priests, the only people who had kept the knowledge of writing hieroglyphs, were now issuing such
decrees. The list of good deeds done by the king for the temples hints at the way in which the support
of the priests was ensured.
The decree is inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree),
demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration).
The importance of this to Egyptology is immense.
Soon after the end of the fourth century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of
how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400
years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them.
Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the
Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François
Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the
foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.
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Soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799 while digging the foundations of
an addition to a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta). On Napoleon's defeat, the stone became the
property of the British under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria (1801) along with other antiquities
that the French had found.
The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited in the British Museum since 1802, with only one break.
Towards the end of the First World War, in 1917, when the Museum was concerned about heavy
bombing in London, they moved it to safety along with other, portable, 'important' objects. The Rosetta
Stone spent the next two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below the ground at
Holborn.
Read this text in arabic (pdf 56kb)
Conserving the Rosetta Stone
In 1999, the Rosetta Stone was the centrepiece of the British Museum exhibition Cracking Codes. As
part of the exhibition preparations, the opportunity was taken to investigate and clean this famous
object.
History uncovered
Work to remove all but the original, ancient material revealed many different substances added to the
surface of the stone over the years.
Read the full article
Translating the Rosetta Stone
Read a full translation of the demotic text on the Rosetta Stone by R.S. Simpson (Demotic Grammar in
the Ptolemaic Sacerdotal Decrees (Oxford, Griffith Institute, 1996), pp. 258-71). Read the translation
Jean François Champollion
Born in 1790, Champollion learnt many languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean,
Chinese, Coptic, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Persian and others.
Read the full article 
Ancient Egypt
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Towards the end of the fourth millennium BC independent city-states unified to begin of over 3,000
years of pharaonic civilisation in the Nile Valley.
Ancient Egypt w orld culture
Ptolemaic period
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Object details
From Fort St Julien, el-Rashid (Rosetta)
Height: 112.3 cm
Width: 75.7 cm
Thickness: 28.4 cm
 
EA 24
Room 4: Egyptian sculpture
 
Excavated by Pierre François Xavier Bouchard
Gift of George III
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References
C.A.R. Andrews, The Rosetta Stone (London, The British Museum Press, 1982)
R. Parkinson, The Rosetta Stone (London, British Museum Press, 2005)
R. Parkinson, Cracking codes: the Rosetta Stone and decipherment (London, The British Museum Press, 1999)
C.A.R. Andrews and S. Quirke, The Rosetta Stone: facsimile drawing (London, The British Museum Press, 1988)
R.S. Simpson, Demotic grammar in the Ptolemaic Sacerdotal Decrees (Oxford, Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum,
1996)
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See this object in our Collection database online
See also the feature quality article about the Rosetta Stone in Wikipedia
Further reading
G.A. Hölbl, History of the Ptolemaic Empire (London, Routledge, 2000)
A.K. Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs: 332 BC–AD 642; From Alexander to the Arab Conquest (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1996)
D.J. Thompson, ‘Literacy and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt’, in Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (eds.), Literacy and Power
in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 67–83
D.J. Thompson, The Ptolemies and Egypt in Andrew Erkine (ed.), A Companion to the Hellenistic World (Oxford, Wiley-
Blackwell, 2003), pp. 105–20.
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