© The Trustees of the British Museum
The Rosetta Stone is currently housed in the British Museum in London.
| The Rosetta Stone was the key that unlocked the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics. As with Assembly code or any other programming language, a translation key is required to go from hieroglyphics to a modern language. No key existed until Napoleon's troops unearthed the Rosetta stone in 1799 near the seaside town of Rosetta in lower Egypt. It is inscribed with information regarding marking the first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V. | © The Trustees of the British Museum |
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The
proclamation is written on the stone three times, once in hieroglyphic, once in demotic (a cursive version of hieroglyphics), and once in
Greek, so that all of the subjects of King Ptolemy could understand it. Fortunately, Greek was still understandable to modern culture, and so Thomas Young, a British physicist, and Jean Francois Champollion, a French Egyptologist,
collaborated to decipher the hieroglyphic and demotic texts by comparing them with the known Greek
text.
The Rosetta Stone is currently housed in the British Museum in London. |
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