The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite slab that was found in 1799 in Egypt near the town of Rosetta (now Rashid), not far from Alexandria, with three identical in meaning carved on it.
1799, July, the Egyptian expedition of Napoleon - while digging trenches in the fortification of Saint-Julien at the mouth of the Nile, near the city of Rosetta, a large black stone was dug out of the ground. The basalt slab, broken off at the edges, was covered with incomprehensible letters. “The upper part of it was significantly broken off and contained 14 lines of hieroglyphs, the figures of which, six lines in size, were located from left to right, following not the direction common for Eastern languages, but the direction of our European languages.
The second inscription under the hieroglyphic part is more complete. It consists of 32 lines of alphabetic characters following in the opposite direction to the upper inscription, and its nature is unknown.
The third part, which is located directly below the previous two, is a Greek inscription in archaic letters. It contains 54 lines, the last of which are deprived of their greater or lesser part due to the fact that a triangular piece has been broken off from one of the lower corners."
The French officers, however, were immediately able to appreciate the uniqueness of their find, and General Menou immediately ordered the translation of the Greek text inscribed on the stone. The Greek inscription, which was easy to read, told about the decree of the priests in honor of the Egyptian king Ptolemy Epiphanes (Greek by origin), who ruled in 196 BC. e. He showed the priests a number of favors, and in gratitude for this they decided to put his statue next to the statue of the supreme deity, and also to declare the king's birthday and the day of his accession to the throne as days of temple holidays.
But no one could read the other two inscriptions. They knew that these were hieroglyphs from the words of Greek writers. Herodotus, for example, was greatly impressed by the Egyptian way of writing: “The Hellenes write and count from left hand to right, and the Egyptians from right to left, although they claim that they write to the right hand, and the Greeks to the left. The Egyptians use a double letter: one is called sacred, the other - folk, simple. Another Greek scientist, Diodorus, spoke about the same, and in the Greek text of the Rosetta Stone it was said that the same content was repeated twice in Egyptian: sacred hieroglyphs and demotic (folk) letters.
In Europe, meanwhile, there were significant changes: several countries declared war on France, in which confusion and despondency reigned; The Directory, hated by many Frenchmen, was weak - and Napoleon Bonaparte, seeing that Egypt was completely in his power, decided to return home, to his homeland. 1799, August - without even discussing his decision with General Jean Baptiste Kleber, to whom he transferred command of the French army in Egypt after his departure, Napoleon boarded the Muyron and departed for France.
The ship was able to slip through unnoticed by the British soldiers; it was from this moment that the stage of rapid changes in French history and its people began. Napoleon, met with a storm of applause from his compatriots upon his arrival, led a coup d'état and overthrew the Directory government, but British and Turkish forces soon attacked the French army in Egyptian territory.
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During the siege, in order to avoid capture by enemy troops, the Rosetta Stone was transported from Cairo to Alexandria. Nevertheless, until the signing of the surrender agreement in Alexandria, in which France admitted defeat to Great Britain, the British forced the French to give them all the antiques and all the values collected during the years of their stay in Egypt. Needless to say, how the British dreamed of taking possession of the Rosetta Stone, which then had already become widely known throughout Europe.
At first, the French refused to voluntarily give up the valuables, but after a while they had to change their mind. General JF Menou, who kept the stone in his house, wrote to the English Colonel Christopher Geli-Hutchinson: “Do you want to get it, General? You can do this because you are the stronger of the two of us … Take him when you want. 1801, September - English Colonel Tomkins Hillgrove Turner, who took part in the battles in Abukir Bay and Alexandria, came to Maine and took the relic. When a detachment of artillerymen carried the treasure through the streets of Alexandria, French soldiers and residents of the city shouted curses and insults after them.
During the trip from Egypt to Britain, many Egyptian valuables were damaged. But because of the special value that the Rosetta Stone represented, Colonel Turner personally accompanied the precious cargo during his voyage aboard the frigate. The Rosetta Stone left Egypt and sailed from Alexandria to England in February 1802.
At Deptford, the stone was lifted aboard a small ship and transported through customs posts. He was placed in one of the halls of the Antique Society so that scientists could easily inspect and study it, and after a while he was sent to his place of permanent residence - to a museum for public viewing. Turner wrote on this occasion: “I believe that the Rosetta Stone - this antique relic, which made it possible to establish the connection of the Egyptian language with other known languages, will persist for a long time. This is a magnificent trophy of the British (I can even say spolia opima - armor taken from the enemy commander, lat.), Honorably obtained by them during the war with the French, and not taken from the defeated defenseless inhabitants. Current Location: British Museum, London, UK.
Despite the fact that the lines written in Greek (like other inscriptions) were somewhat damaged, their meaning was not difficult to understand. This stone was supposedly one of several, which were inscribed after the meeting of the priests in Memphis. The text on the stone is dated 196 BC. e. and is a gratitude inscription addressed to King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. During the Hellenistic period, many such documents within the Greek oecumene were distributed in the form of bi- or trilingual texts. Comparison of the three versions of the text was supposed to serve as a starting point in decoding.
The decree carved in stone stated that Ptolemy, who was not yet 13 years old and who ruled the country under the tutelage of senior advisers, was able to achieve prosperity in Egypt; this message was "carved on steles of solid stone in the form of hieroglyphs, as well as in Egyptian and Greek, and exhibited in all temples of the first, second and third classes, in which the Emperor was exalted." The main benefits of Ptolemy V are: the decoration and restoration of temples, the release of prisoners, an end to forced recruitment into the navy, the creation of a fair system of justice in the country, the prevention of floods by building dams, and the decree on the execution of notorious criminals who committed serious crimes.
But the initial hopes that the Rosetta Stone would become the long-awaited key to deciphering ancient languages were dashed after some time. Due to the fact that several pieces of stone were missing, the translation of hieroglyphs and demotic writing by comparing these fragments was incredibly difficult. In addition, in those days it was not yet finally proven that all three fragments of the text, carved in stone, contain the same message. Hieroglyphs were the most ancient form of Egyptian writing.
As a rule, hieroglyphs were carved on the stone. When papyrus began to be used as writing material, hieroglyphs gradually replaced other forms of writing; so, for example, hieratic writing - the italic form of writing - eventually led to the emergence of an even simpler italic form of writing, demotic. Thus, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone did not contribute to solving the mystery of the ancient Egyptian writing. European scholars have tried to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs since the 16th century. The German Jesuit Antonasius Kircher, the English Bishop William Warburton, and the French scholar Nicola Frere are the most famous specialists in this field. But due to the erroneous assumption that the hieroglyphs simply represent a certain system of pictures, they were unable to accurately decipher their meaning.
The meaning of some pictures was quite obvious, like, for example, images of animals, while the meaning of other pictures, which showed rather strange and mysterious images, remained unclear. Moreover, there was also no precise evidence that the meaning of the most understandable pictures was exactly what scientists attributed to them. The experts had more and more questions in connection with the study of hieroglyphs. Does one symbol express one idea, or can it express several? Can several symbols be the expression of a single thought? In which direction should hieroglyphs be read? What were the guides of the ancient Egyptian scribes, drawing certain hieroglyphs to express the meaning?
One of the first scientists who began to analyze the demotic writing of the Rosetta Stone was the famous orientalist French A. I. Sylvester de Sacy. He was able to correctly understand some of the words in the text. Later, in 1802, the Swedish scientist I. D. Akherblat deciphered a few more symbols; he also managed to understand the meaning of several words written in Coptic. But this was the end of Okerblat's discoveries; the words he identified were composed of letters of the alphabet, and the scientist himself was firmly convinced that the demotic writing is purely alphabetical. This point of view was ultimately recognized as erroneous.
During all these years, the mysterious stone was quietly kept in the British Museum, while scientists did not cease to put forward various assumptions about the nature of the mysterious hieroglyphs written on it, trying to find a code to decipher them. The first major discovery on this path was made around 1816 by the English physicist and physician Thomas Young, who also got one of the copies of the Rosetta Stone.
He suggested that hieroglyphs can also have phonetic value, that is, they represent different sounds of the language. This idea was not new, but before, scientists have not been able to find convincing evidence of this fact. Previously, scientists assumed that special figurines, in which different symbols are enclosed, depicted royal names. Jung tried to identify the phonetic meaning of the symbols of one such picture, which was present in several places on the Rosetta stone: in his opinion, they belonged to the designation of the name of Ptolemy, which was later confirmed as a result of the successful identification of several such symbols. Such pictures were called cartouches.
But despite some breakthroughs and guesses, the hieroglyphs could not be completely deciphered. The most difficult thing was to read the hieroglyphic part of the inscription, because the secret of such a letter was lost in ancient Roman times. The Englishman Young began to decipher the hieroglyphs, but the Frenchman Champollion managed to achieve complete success. He proved that the hieroglyphic system mainly consists of phonetic and alphabetic characters. During his short life, this scientist managed to compile an extensive dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language and form its grammatical rules. Thus, the role of the Rosetta Stone in the development of Egyptology turned out to be truly invaluable.