On July !9th, !799, a French soldier found what would end up being the key the key to understanding a language that scholars had deemed "dead" for over 2000 years. The Rosetta Stone - as it is now known - is a thick, basalt slab containing three identical the transcriptions on Greek, Egyptian and hieroglyphics, and Egyptian demonic. Here are five things you probably did not know about the Rosetta Stone.
The Rosetta Stone was carved in 196 BC during the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Rosetta Stone was created in his ninth year as Pharoah and it lays out all the nice things Ptolemy V had done for the Egyptian people including the repeal of various taxes. The Stone also contains instructions for erecting statues of him in temples, you know, just in case you feel so inclined.
Today, we tend to think of the small drawings Egyptians did to represent objects and sounds as a huge part of Egyptian culture, right up there with pyramids and King Tut. But, the truth is that at the time the Stone was created, hieroglyphs were reserved for important or religious documents only. So, Ptolemy made sure to include the common tongue of the Egyptian people, demotic, on the slab along with ancient Greek, which was the language spoken by Egyptian rulers at the time. By including all three languages, Ptolemy made sure the masses knew what a great ruler he was and understood the decrees he was passing down following his coronation.
It's believed that the Rosetta Stone's first home was in a temple before being moved a few times in the Middle Ages and eventually finding it's way into a heap of building materials the Ottoman Empire used to construct Fort Julien. It was while reconstructing the fort that Bonaparte's army came across the stone. Pierre Bouchard, one of Napoleon's soldiers, knew Bonaparte wanted to preserve ancient artifacts and saved the stone. When the British later defeated Bonaparte in 1801, they took hold of the stone and have kept it ever since.
Since making it is way to the British Museum in 1801, where it is now the most-visited exhibit, the Rosetta Stone has stayed pretty much in place. The one exception was during World War I when British officials elected to relocate the stone and other priceless, irreplaceable artifacts to an underground bunker for fear of bombing attacks. It's unclear what the future holds for the Rosetta Stone, however, in 2003, Egyptian officials requested that the stone be returned to the homeland. British officials sent a perfect replica as a gift hoping that would be enough, but Egypt still wants the original back in the country.
It was a French scholar, Jean-François Champollion, who finally discovered that the ancient hieroglyphs represented the sounds of the Egyptian language, and through the Rosetta Stone and other ancient texts was able to decipher key characters that translated the stone and unlocked an entire culture. Champollion went on to write a dictionary of Egyptian hieroglyphs and is widely credited as the man responsible for bringing back a 2,000-year-old language.