Not Just a Language Tool
The History Behind the Real Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone is one of the world’s most popular and well-known language-learning softwares, but many users have wondered about where its name came from. The original Rosetta Stone was once the most enigmatic Egyptian artifact that confounded scholars for a number of years. When they finally cracked the code, one of the lost secrets of ancient Egypt was revealed. The Rosetta Stone is a slab of granite that has inscriptions of a decree issued in 196 B.C. by Egypt’s ruler at the time, Ptolemy V, and a group of Egyptian clergy members. The decree was written in hieroglyphics, ancient Greek, and Demotic, which was a script used by the common people. Experts estimate the stone’s creation was over 2,000 years ago. The slab was discovered in July 1799 by a group of French army engineers who were operating under Napoleon Bonaparte’s orders near the Egyptian town of Rosetta. The British Army would go on to defeat France in Egypt during the French Revolutionary Wars in 1801. Under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria, the British claimed the Rosetta Stone, along with other Egyptian artifacts found by the French.
The British relocated the stone to the British Museum in London, where it was stored in a temporary structure until they could strengthen the floors of the museum to support its incredible weight. Various scientists studied the artifact with no success, and it was ultimately deciphered by French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion. Champollion discovered that hieroglyphics were a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs. Earlier scientists had falsely inferred that hieroglyphics were simply symbolic picture writing and nothing more. For his discovery, Champollion was named the founding father of Egyptology. If you’re interested in viewing the Rosetta Stone, it is still on display at the British Museum in London where it’s been displayed for 220 years, with the exception of a temporary relocation during World War I. While the Rosetta Stone has called London home for hundreds of years, there have been recent requests to return it to its homeland in Egypt.
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