Hello steemians, if you had the opportunity to read my post Ancient Knowledge: How did the Romans do math? you may have realized that one of my greatest hobbies are history and archeology. The knowledge that we have now acquired about extremely ancient and millenarian civilizations such as the Egyptian or the Sumerian is perhaps one of the things that I love the most and is that being able to witness how most of these discoveries have been carried out thanks to fortuitous events is incredible.

One of the facts that has caught my attention is how today's modern civilization, after having almost completely discarded the Egyptian script and language, thanks perhaps to "destiny" have been able to rebuild much of the legacy of a civilization thousand years.

The truth is that thanks to the discovery of a stone in 1799, it was possible to obtain traces of one of the most ancient and prominent civilizations of all humanity.

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The Rosetta stone.

The Rosetta Stone is a piece of an ancient Egyptian monument from 196 B.C

This piece of stone was what made it possible to understand, through its engravings, the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which until the discovery of this rock were unintelligible.

The Rosetta stone is made of black carved basalt and measures 114 cm high and 72 cm wide and has a thickness of 27 cm, it also weighs approximately 729 kg.

The discovery of this stone, meant a turning point for the understanding of a whole language since its carving is written in three different languages, which allowed that linguists and interpreters of the time could decipher the meaning of the Egyptian pictograms.

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Discovery of the Rosetta stone.

The stone was moved between different places to finish as part of a building in the city of Rosetta, where it was found in 1799 by a French soldier named Pierre-François Bouchard while he was in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte in his tireless campaign for conquering Egypt.

During the campaign of conquest launched by Napoleon, professors and researchers were recruited to be responsible for collecting information on Egyptian culture.

While those investigators were in a thorough search for the city of Rosetta (now known as Rashid), it was one of the soldiers who happened to run into a strange dark stone that caught the attention of the investigators, right away so it was transported to the Institute d'Egypte in Cairo in 1799.

However, two years after its discovery (1801) the French lost the war to the British and would be completely stripped of their booties and thus the stone would pass into the hands of the English and then be put on display in the British Museum of the city from London where it has remained until today.

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A key to the rediscovery of the Egyptian language.

The discovery of the Rosetta stone meant a hope for the rediscovery of a language that was about to be forgotten. At the time of its discovery this stone was of vital importance because as it was written in 3 different languages, this allowed that through the two languages that were known, to carry out a hieroglyphic translation.

The presence of the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra in Greek, repeated in hieroglyphs inside a cartridge, would be the key to finding the translation of said hieroglyphics. After much research, it was paradoxically a Frenchman Jean-François Cham¬pollion, who solved the mystery of the hieroglyphics and determined that in the Egyptian language the hieroglyphics, besides representing an object or an idea, also have a phonetic value.

It should be noted that Champollion never worked on the original stone, he did it through drawings of it.

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The translation of the hieroglyphics.

Forgotten and lost by the Egyptians, discovered by the French, and taken as spoils of war by the British ... to finally be translated by a Frenchman.

Before being translated this piece of Egyptian history went through many hands. In the first place, it was the Swedish Johan Akerblad who tried to decipher it completely but was only able to solve some of the names, making a simple comparison of the texts. Then it was an Englishman who would try to decipher it and it was Thomas Young who throughout his investigation concluded that the signs of the cartridges should refer to real names. And from there it was where Jean François Champollion took over who would finally translate it.

In 1822 the French Champollion who was a specialist in languages began to study the stone with the aim of finding out the hieroglyphic language, so the first step he made was to assign sounds to each of the glyphs comparing them with the names and sounds of the text Greek. Then he went to Dorset to visit the obelisk of the temple of Philae where there is also an inscription of two languages: Greek and hieroglyphics.

And it was there that he found that Thomas Young was correct when he determined that the glyphs on the stone cartridges referred to real names since the inscriptions on that monument were identical to those on the Rosetta Stone.

The names were those of Ptolemy and Cleopatra!

After that great discovery, the Frenchman embarked on another theory and concluded that the Coptic, a language also Egyptian but much older should have similarity with the one he was looking for so that in order to verify the veracity of that theory he compares some drawings found in Abu Simbel with those of the stone. And so little by little and after many comparisons could be translating the entire text.

In 1822 Champollion published Précis du Système Hiéroglyphique with his fascinating discovery.

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What does the Rosetta Stone say?

The stone was a text written by priests of the Ptolemaic period, in 196 B.C

There is carved a decree that glorified the figure of Pharaoh Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his reign extolling all the positive things that Pharaoh had done for the people of Egypt.

The text is carved in the three main languages ​of that region:

• Hieroglyph.
• Demotic.
• Greek.

If you want to read the complete translation into English you can do it here

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References.

• Rosetta stone - Wikipedia
• Rosetta stone - Britannica
• Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone - British museum
• Mystery of the Rosetta Stone - Discovering Egypt
• The Discovery and Importance of the Rosetta Stone - Social Studies for Kids
• Rosetta Stone: Key to Ancient Egyptian Writing - Livescience
• What Does the Rosetta Stone Say? - Britannica

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[1] All the content exposed in this post is a compilation of different sources besides my knowledge in the subject.
[2] All the images used are correctly labeled for reuse.