Rosetta Stone

The stone is made of granodiorite - a dark, coarse-grained igneous rock harder than granite - and measures 112.3 cm in height, 75.7 cm in width, and 28.4 cm in thickness, weighing approximately 760 kg (nearly three-quarters of a ton). It is broken and incomplete; it represents the upper portion of a larger stela, with the missing lower section having contained additional text in all three scripts. The stone was not unique - it was one of multiple copies of the Memphis Decree placed in temples throughout Egypt. At least twenty-nine such stelae have been discovered to date, with twenty-two remaining in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone became famous simply because it was the first one discovered, and because its reuse as building material in an Ottoman fort preserved it from deliberate destruction.

The three scripts on the stone each served a different function in Ptolemaic Egypt. The top section contains fourteen lines of formal Egyptian hieroglyphs, the sacred script used for priestly and monumental texts. This section is the most damaged, with significant portions missing. The middle section contains thirty-two lines of Demotic script, the cursive form of Egyptian writing used for daily administration and literature. The bottom section contains fifty-four lines of Ancient Greek in the Koine dialect, the language of the Ptolemaic ruling class - this section was immediately readable to nineteenth-century scholars and provided the essential key to deciphering the other two scripts.

The text itself is the Memphis Decree - an official proclamation by a synod (council) of Egyptian priests assembled at Memphis on the first anniversary of Ptolemy V Epiphanes' coronation. The decree confirms Ptolemy V's divine status as pharaoh, lists his benevolent acts toward the temples (tax exemptions and restoration of religious institutions), records his suppression of native rebellions (the "Great Rebellion" of 204-186 BCE), and grants the priesthood increased stipends and financial support. Politically, the decree represents a bargain: the priests confirm the young king's divine status, and he grants them economic privileges and temple funding. Thirteen-year-old Ptolemy V, a Macedonian Greek, needed Egyptian priestly support to legitimize his rule over a restive native population.

The decipherment was a decades-long international effort. After the British defeated the French in 1801, the stone was claimed under the Treaty of Alexandria and shipped to the British Museum, though copies of the inscriptions had already been distributed to scholars across Europe. Thomas Young, the brilliant English polymath, made the first breakthrough by demonstrating that some hieroglyphs were phonetic - representing sounds, not just ideas. He correctly identified the cartouches containing the names "Ptolemy" and "Cleopatra." Jean-Francois Champollion, who had studied Coptic (the descendant of ancient Egyptian) since childhood, made the final breakthrough on September 14, 1822. He realized that hieroglyphs were a mixed system: some signs represented sounds (phonograms), some represented whole words (logograms), and some represented categories of meaning (determinatives). Using his knowledge of Coptic, he correctly read the cartouches of "Ramses" and "Thutmose." On September 27, 1822, he announced his discovery at the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres - the birth date of Egyptology as a scientific discipline.