The Rosetta Stone: a priestly decree in three scripts

In July 1799, during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, French soldiers strengthening a fort near Rashid, the town Europeans called Rosetta, found a dark slab covered with inscriptions. The officer Pierre-François Bouchard immediately understood its importance: three different scripts appeared on the stone. It was the beginning of the story of perhaps the most famous object in archaeology, now kept at the British Museum in London.

What the text says

The stone, made of granodiorite and slightly over a metre tall, is a fragment of a larger slab. It records a decree issued in 196 BC by a synod of priests gathered at Memphis in honour of the young king Ptolemy V Epiphanes, on the first anniversary of his coronation. The text lists the benefits the ruler granted to the temples, such as tax exemptions and restorations, and in return establishes cult honours for the king in every sanctuary of Egypt.

The decree itself orders that it be carved on stone in «sacred, native and Greek letters». The three bands of writing correspond to this formula: at the top the hieroglyphs, largely lost because the stone is broken; in the middle Demotic, the everyday script of the time; at the bottom Greek, the language of the Ptolemaic court. The same text could thus be read by the gods, the priests, the people and the administration.

From the French to the British

The scholars of the French expedition immediately made casts and copies, which circulated in Europe. After the French defeat, however, the capitulation of Alexandria in 1801 handed the collected antiquities to the British, and the stone reached London in 1802. Since then it has been displayed at the British Museum, where it remains today, and on its side one can read painted inscriptions recalling its capture by the British army.

The Greek section was translated quickly, since that language was well known. The problem lay with the other two scripts. The Frenchman Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the Swede Johan David Åkerblad worked on the Demotic and managed to identify some proper names, such as that of Ptolemy. Yet both the general workings of Demotic and, above all, those of the hieroglyphs remained obscure.

A key, not a solution

It is often said that the Rosetta Stone made it possible to read hieroglyphs, but the reality is more nuanced. The stone offered a bilingual text, allowing words known in Greek to be compared with Egyptian signs. The British scholar Thomas Young, in the 1810s, recognised the phonetic value of some signs in the cartouche of Ptolemy. Complete decipherment, however, required other texts, a knowledge of Coptic and the insight of Jean-François Champollion.

Today we also know that the stone was not a unique specimen. Copies of the same decree, more or less complete, have been found at other Egyptian sites, confirming that the text was meant to be displayed in many temples across the country. The Rosetta example owes its fame not to uniqueness but to the moment and place of its discovery.

For an administrative decree written to celebrate a teenage king, its fate has been extraordinary. The Rosetta Stone has become the symbol of every key able to unlock hidden knowledge, and its name has entered common usage for any tool that allows an unknown language or a closed system of signs to be understood.