15th July: The Rosetta Stone

On this date in 1799 the Rosetta Stone was discovered in the Egyptian village of Rosette, by French Captain Pierre Bouchard. 10 facts about the Rosetta Stone:

1. French soldiers were rebuilding an Ottoman fort near Rosette (modern day Rashid) when Bouchard spotted a slab of granite sticking out of the ground. When he looked closely at it, he saw that it was covered in script and was probably valuable. Jacques-Francoise Menou, the chief general in Egypt, happened to be at the site at the time and was able to see it for himself. Soldiers excavated the stone, and months later it was presented for inspection to Napoleon himself.
2. It was taken by the British after they defeated Napoleon in 1801 and commandeered many of the Egyptian artifacts the French had collected. Menou tried to keep it in French hands by claiming it was his personal property, but the Brits weren't having any of that and insisted the stone was handed over as part of the official surrender.
3. It has been in the British Museum since 1802, apart from the two years it spent hidden underground in the tube system during World War II. For many years, people could walk right up to the stone and touch it - but not any more. Curators realised handling it wasn't good for it and locked it in a glass case.
4. Needless to say, Egypt would like it back. They have been asking for it since 2003 as, they say, it's a key piece of Egyptian cultural identity. The British Museum keeps saying no, but did give Egypt a gift of a full size replica in 2005.
5. The Rosetta Stone is 112.3 cm high, 75.7 cm wide and 28.4 cm thick. It weighs approximately 760 kilograms (1,680 lb). It is a fragment of a larger stele of granodiorite igneous rock.
6. So we know it was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, but what was actually written on it? Propaganda, basically. It was something called the Memphis Decree, which is about king Ptolemy V, who had assumed the throne at the age of 5 (after his parents were murdered in a court conspiracy). It was probably to convince people that, even though their king was young, he was a legitimate ruler and did good things like repeal taxes, donate money and corn to temples, have statues erected in the temples and spend money to ensure the prosperity of Egypt.
7. The decree was inscribed on the stone in three languages, hieroglyphics, the sacred script of the empire; Egyptian demotic, the common language; and Greek, the official language. This meant it could be widely read and understood. Each version of the decree varies slightly from the rest, so there is no definitive English translation of it.
8. It took over twenty years to decipher the hieroglyphics. Translating the Greek and demotic was relatively easy, but hieroglyphics were more complicated. The fact that people assumed it was a symbolic system when actually it was phonetic didn't help.
9. Two men played particularly important roles in cracking the code. British scholar Thomas Young discovered that the cartouches were drawn around proper names. The French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion took it from there and had a major breakthrough, realising the sun symbol meant "Ra" and deciphered the name "Rameses", thus realising it was phonetic. Champollion was so excited by this discovery that he ran to find his brother and tell him. He burst into his brother's office, yelling “I have it!” and then fainted.
10. Rosetta stone has become a term for anything that provides a key to understanding something, for example, in medicine, the key set of genes to the human leucocyte antigen has been described as being “the Rosetta Stone of immunology”. The Rosetta spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency to perform a detailed study of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko was named after the Rosetta Stone because it is hoped it will lead to understanding the origins of the Solar System.

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