Rosetta stone
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree published in Memphis in 196 BC. C. in the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three different scripts: the upper text in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the middle part in demotic writing, and the lower part in ancient Greek. Because it presents essentially the same content in all three inscriptions, with minor differences between them, this stone provided the key to the modern decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The stele was carved in the Hellenistic period and is thought to have originally been displayed inside a temple, possibly in nearby Sais. It was probably moved at the end of Antiquity or during the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and was finally used as a building material in a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. 1799 French captain Pierre-François Bouchard during the French campaign in Egypt. As the first ancient multilingual text discovered in modern times, the Rosetta Stone aroused public interest in its potential to decipher the hitherto unintelligible Egyptian hieroglyphic script, and consequently its lithographic and plaster copies began to circulate among museums and European scholars. The British defeated the French in Egypt and the stone was transported to London after the signing of the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. It has been on public display since 1802 in the British Museum, where it is the most visited piece.
The first complete translation of the text into ancient Greek appeared in 1803. In 1822, the French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion announced in Paris the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, but it would take linguists some time to read other inscriptions for sure and ancient Egyptian texts. The main advances in decoding were the recognition that the stela offers three versions of the same text (1799), that the demotic text uses phonetic characters to write foreign names (1802), that the hieroglyphic text does so too, and has general similarities. with demotic (Thomas Young in 1814) and that, in addition to being used for foreign names, phonetic characters were also used to write native Egyptian words (Champollion between 1822 and 1824).
Later, two fragmentary copies of the same decree were discovered, and several bilingual and trilingual Egyptian inscriptions are known today, including two Ptolemaic decrees, such as the Canopus Decree of 238 BC. C. and the Decree of Memphis of Ptolemy IV, c. 218 BC For this reason, although the Rosetta stone is no longer unique, it was an essential reference for the current understanding of the literature and civilization of Ancient Egypt, and the term itself "Rosetta stone" is used today in other contexts such as the name of the essential key for a new field of knowledge.
Description
The Rosetta Stone is 112.3 cm high, 75.7 cm wide and 28.4 cm thick, while its weight is estimated at approximately 760 kilograms. It bears three inscriptions: the top one in hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, the central one in Egyptian demotic script and the lower one in ancient Greek. The front surface is polished and the inscriptions lightly incised on it, the sides are smoothed and the back is roughly worked, no doubt because it was not at the same time. seen in its original location.
The stele is described as "a stone of black granite, inscribed with three...found at Rosetta" in a modern catalog of objects discovered by the French expedition to Egypt. Sometime after its arrival in London, the inscriptions on the stela were filled in with white chalk to make them more legible, while the rest of the surface was covered with a layer of carnauba wax intended to protect it from visitors' fingers, giving it a black color. to the stone; this led to its misidentification as black basalt. These additions were removed in a 1999 cleanup that revealed its original dark gray, lustrous crystalline structure, and pink veining across its upper left corner. Comparisons with the Klemm collection of Egyptian stones in the British Museum showed their strong resemblance to rock from a small granodiorite quarry at Gebel Tingar, on the west bank of the Nile and west of Elephantine in the Aswan region, whose Granodiorite stones present this peculiar pinkish vein.
Original Stela
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stela, although no other parts have been found where it was found. Due to missing fragments, none of its texts are complete. The most damaged is the upper one, written in hieroglyphics, of which only fourteen lines are visible, all interrupted on the right side, and twelve of them incomplete on the left side. The next record written in Demotic has survived better, as it has thirty-two lines, fourteen of which are slightly damaged on the right hand side. The lower text in Greek has fifty-four lines, twenty-seven of them complete and the rest gradually damaged by the diagonal break in the lower right corner of the stela.
The full extent of the hieroglyphic text and overall size of the original stela can be estimated based on comparison with other surviving stelae, including other copies of the same decree. The earlier decree of Canopus, created in 238 B.C. during the reign of Ptolemy III, it is 219 cm high and 82 cm wide, and contains thirty-six lines of hieroglyphic text, seventy-three Demotic and seventy-four Greek with texts of similar length. With this comparison it can be estimated that fourteen to fifteen lines of the hieroglyphic text on the Rosetta stone, about 30 cm, have been lost. In addition to the inscriptions, it probably contained a scene depicting the pharaoh presenting himself to the gods surmounted by a winged solar disk (Behedety), as on the stela of Canopus. These parallels and a hieroglyphic sign for "stele" on the same stone—O26 from Gardiner's list—suggest that it originally had a rounded top and was 149 cm in height.
The decree of Memphis and its context
The stele was made after the coronation of Ptolemy V and a decree establishing divine worship for the new ruler was inscribed on it, issued by a congress of priests gathered in Memphis. The date given for it, "4 Xandicus" of the Macedonian calendar and "18 Meshir" of the Egyptian, corresponds to March 27, 196 BC. C., ninth year of the reign of Ptolemy V. This is confirmed by the appointment of four priests who officiated in the same year: Aëtus, son of Aëtus, was a priest of the divine cult of Alexander the Great and the five Ptolemies until Ptolemy himself V. The other three priests, named in order on the stela, directed the cult of Berenice Evergetes, wife of Ptolemy III, Arsinoe II Philadelphus —sister and wife of Ptolemy II— and Arsinoe Filopator, mother of Ptolemy V. However, a second date is given in the Greek text and in the hieroglyph, corresponding with November 27, 197 BC. C., official anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V. The demotic inscription is in contradiction with this data, since it includes a list of days in March for the decree and the anniversary, and although the reason for these discrepancies is not known, it is clear that the decree was published in 196 BC. C. and intended to restore the dominance of the Ptolemaic pharaohs over Egypt.
The decree dates from a turbulent period in Egyptian history. Ptolemy V Epiphanes (pharaoh between 204 and 181 BC), son of Ptolemy IV Philopator and his sister and wife Arsinoe, became ruler at the age of five after the sudden death of his parents, both assassinated, according to contemporary sources, in a conspiracy that involved the lover of Ptolemy IV, Agathoclea. The conspirators ruled Egypt as guardians of Ptolemy V until, two years later, a revolution led by the general Tlepolemus broke out, and Agathoclea and her family were lynched by a mob in Alexandria. Tlepolemus was replaced as tutor in 201 BC. C. by Aristomenes de Alicia, who was prime minister at the time of the Memphis decree.
Foreign powers aggravated the internal problems of the lágida kingdom. Antiochus III the Great and Philip V of Macedonia made a pact to divide Egypt's overseas possessions, as Philip had seized various cities and islands in Thrace and Caria, while the Battle of Panio (198 BC) had caused the transfer of Celesyria, including Judea, from the Lagids to the Seleucids. Meanwhile, in southern Egypt there was a state of revolt that had begun under the reign of Ptolemy IV and was led by Horunnefer and then by his successor Anjunnefer. Both the war and internal revolt were still active when the young Ptolemy V was officially crowned in Memphis at the age of 12—seven years after the start of his tutored reign—and when the decree of Memphis was published.
The Rosetta stela bears certain similarities to other donation stelae depicting the ruling pharaoh granting tax exemption to resident priests. Pharaohs had been making such stelae for two thousand years, with the oldest dating back to the Ancient empire. Although in the early stages the pharaoh himself issued these decrees, the Memphis decree was published by the priests, guarantors of traditional Egyptian culture. The decree records that Ptolemy V gave silver and grain to the temples, and that in his In the eighth year of his reign, during a particularly high flood of the Nile, he ordered the excess water to be dammed up for the benefit of the farmers. In exchange for these actions, the priests offered prayers on the pharaoh's birthday, the coronation day would be celebrated annually and all the priests of Egypt would serve him along with the other gods. The decree concludes with the instruction that a copy be placed in each temple inscribed with the "language of the gods" (hieroglyphic), the "language of documents" (demotic), and the "language of the Greeks" used by the government. Ptolemaic.
Securing the favor of the priestly caste was essential for the Ptolemaic pharaohs to maintain effective control over the people. The High Priests of Memphis, the city where the pharaoh was crowned, were particularly powerful as the highest religious authority at the time and had influence throughout the kingdom. Since the decree was issued in Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt, rather than in Alexandria, the dynasty's center of government, the young pharaoh evidently wanted to win their active support., like the two previous decrees, included texts in Egyptian to show its relevance for the indigenous people, subjected to the Hellenic minority, through sacred writing linked to native traditions.
There is no definitive translation of the decree into any modern language due to minor differences between the three original texts and because knowledge of ancient scriptures continues to develop. The following is a transcription of the texts of the decree, translated from the complete English version offered by Edwyn R. Bevan in The House of Ptolemy (1927), based on the Greek text and with comments on the variations between it and the two Egyptian texts. Bevan's version, abridged, begins thus:
In the reign of the young man—who has received the royalty of his father—master of the crowns, glorious, who has consolidated Egypt and is pious to the gods, superior to his enemies, who has restored the civilized life of men, lord of the Feasts of the Thirty Years, as Hefestus the Great; a Pharaoh, like the Sun, the great lighthouse of the high and lower regions,The high priests and the prophets and those who enter the tabernacle to clothe the gods, and the bearers of feathers and the sacred scribes, and all the other priests... being gathered in the temple of Menphis this day, declared:
Since Pharaoh Ptolemy reigns, the eternal, the beloved of Ptah, the god Epiphanes Eucaristos, the son of King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoe, gods Filopators, have been greatly benefited both the temples and those who live in them, in addition to all those who depend on him, being a god born of God and goddess—like Osiri
It is good for the priests of all the temples on earth to increase considerably the existing honors to Ptolemy, the eternal, the beloved of Ptah... and there will be a feast for the Ptolemy pharaoh, the eternal, the beloved of Ptah, the Epiphan God, every year in all the temples of the earth from the first of Topius.
The stela was almost certainly not made in the town of Rashid (Rosetta), where it was found, and probably came from a temple located in the interior of Egyptian territory, probably the royal city of Sais. The temple from which it came must have been closed around 392 AD. when the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Theodosius I, ordered the closure of all pagan temples. At some point the stele broke apart, its largest fragment now known as the Rosetta Stone. Egyptian temples were later used as quarries for new construction and the stela was probably reused as such. It was later incorporated into the foundations of a fortress built by the Mamluk Sultan Qaitbey (c. 1416/18-1496) to defend the Bolbitin branch of the Nile at Rashid, where it remained for another three centuries.
Since the discovery of the Rosetta stone, two other inscriptions of the Memphis decree have been found: the Nubayrah stele and an inscription found in the Temple of Philé. Unlike that one, the hieroglyphics of these others were relatively intact and later Egyptologists such as Ernest Wallis Budge used them to complement the lost parts of it.
Finding
During Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt in 1798, the Science and Arts Commission accompanied the expeditionary army, a body made up of 167 technical experts. On July 15, 1799, while French soldiers under the command of Colonel d'Hautpoul were working to reinforce the defenses of Fort Julien, located about 3 km northeast of the Egyptian port city of Rashid (Rosetta), Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard sighted a plaque where soldiers had excavated a plaque with inscriptions on one side. He and d'Hautpoul immediately saw that it could be important and informed General Jacques-François Menou, who He was in Rosetta. The finding was announced to Napoleon's newly created scientific association in Cairo, the Institut d'Égypte, through a report drafted by commission member Michel Ange Lancret, who noted that it contained three inscriptions, the first in hieroglyphics and the third in Greek, and rightly suggested that all the inscriptions might be versions of the same text. Lancret's report, dated July 19, 1799, was read at a meeting of the Institute on July 25. Bouchard meanwhile transported the stone to Cairo for examination by experts. Napoleon himself inspected what had already come to be called La Pierre de Rosette, the Rosetta Stone, shortly before his return to France in August 1799.
The discovery was announced in September in the Courrier de l'Égypte, the official newspaper of the French expedition, where an anonymous reporter expressed the hope that the stone would one day hold the key to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1800, three of the commission's technical experts devised some ways of making copies of the texts on the stone, and one of them, the printer and linguist Jean-Joseph Marcel, is credited as the first to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics. realized that the central text, thought to be Syriac, was written in Egyptian Demotic, rarely used for inscriptions and therefore rarely seen by scholars at the time. It was the artist and inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté who found a way to using the stone as an printing block, and Antoine Galland used a slightly different system to reproduce the inscriptions. General Charles Dugua took the resulting prints to Paris so that European scholars could already see the inscriptions and try to read them.
After Napoleon's departure, French troops repelled British and Ottoman attacks for 18 months, until in March 1801 the English landed in Aboukir Bay. General Jacques-François Menou, one of the first to see the Rosetta stone, was then commander of the French expedition. His troops, including the commission, headed north towards the Mediterranean coast to meet the enemy, transporting the stone along with other antiquities. Defeated in battle, Menou and the remnants of his army, carrying the stone, withdrew to Alexandria, where they were surrounded, besieged, and forced to surrender on August 30.
From French to British possession
Following the surrender, a dispute arose over the fate of all discoveries and finds the French made in Egypt, including various artifacts, biological specimens, notes, plans, and drawings assembled by members of the commission. Menou refused to hand them over, claiming they belonged to the Institute, but British General John Hely-Hutchinson refused to liberate the city until Menou turned them over to the British. Academics Edward Daniel Clarke and William Richard Hamilton, recently arrived from England, agreed to examine the collections and reported seeing many objects that the French had not disclosed; In a letter, Clarke stated: "We found much more in your possession than we could have imagined".
When Hutchinson claimed that all the materials were British Crown property, a French academic, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, replied to Clarke and Hamilton that they would prefer to burn all their discoveries — alluding to the legendary Library of Alexandria fire. rather than give them to the British. Clarke and Hamilton communicated to Hutchinson the position of the French and he finally agreed to some findings; for example natural specimens to remain the private property of French academics. Upon learning, Menou promptly claimed the Rosetta stone as his private property, which would have meant the stele remained a French possession, but General Hutchinson, who was also aware of its value, did not agree to the request. Eventually an agreement was reached and the transfer of objects was included in the Capitulation of Alexandria, which was signed by representatives of the British, French and Ottoman forces.
Exactly how the stone passed from French to British hands is unclear, as accounts differ. Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who transferred it to England, later said that he personally confiscated it from Menou and loaded it into a chest. In a much more detailed account, Edward Daniel Clarke claims that a French "official and member of the Institute" had secretly led his student John Cripps and Hamilton to the street behind Menou's residence and shown them the stone, hidden under some rugs. protective, in the baggage of the French general. According to Clarke, his informant feared that the stele would be stolen if French soldiers saw it. Hutchinson was informed and the stone, possibly transported by Turner and his weapon, was confiscated.
Turner brought the stone to England aboard the captured French frigate HMS Egyptienne and arrived at Portsmouth in February 1802. His orders were to present it along with other antiquities to King George III, who, represented by the Secretary of War Lord Hobart, ordered that it should be placed in the British Museum. According to Turner's account, he urged, and Hobart agreed, that the stele be presented to the scholars of the London Society of Antiquaries, of which Turner was a member. It was seen and discussed there at a meeting on March 11, 1802.
During 1802, the Society created four plaster models of the inscriptions, which were given to the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Trinity College, Dublin. Soon afterward printed copies of the inscriptions were made and circulated among European scholars, and in late 1802 the stone was transferred to the British Museum, where it remains today. New English inscriptions were made on it, painted in white on the sides of the stone. slab, stating that it was "captured by the British Army" and "presented by King George III".
The stone has been on display almost continuously in the British Museum since June 1802. In the mid-19th century it was given the inventory number "EA 24" ("EA" stands for "Egyptian Antiquities"). It was part of a collection of ancient Egyptian objects captured from the French expedition that included the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II and the statue of a high priest of Amun. The stone objects were soon found to be too heavy for the floors of Montagu House, original building of the British Museum, and moved to a new area built inside the mansion. The Rosetta Stone was moved to the sculpture gallery in 1834, shortly after Montagu House was demolished and replaced by the building that now houses the British Museum. According to museum records, the Rosetta Stone is its most visited object and its image has been the institution's best-selling postcard for decades.
The Rosetta Stone was initially displayed at a slight angle to the horizontal and rested on a purpose-made metal stand that required slight carving on its sides to ensure stability. Initially it did not have protective cover, and despite efforts to prevent visitors from touching it, in 1874 it became necessary to place a protective structure on it. Since 2004 the stone has been exhibited in a special display case in the center of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. A replica of the Rosetta Stone as it appeared to visitors in the early 19th century, without glass and free to touch, is on display in the King's Library in the British Museum.
Towards the end of World War I, in 1917, museum officials were concerned about the heavy bombardment of London and the stone was moved for its safety along with other valuables. The stele remained for the next two years at a London Postal Service Railway station in Mount Pleasant, fifty feet below ground level. Other than in wartime, the Rosetta stone has left the museum only once, for a month, in October 1972 to be exhibited together with the famous Champollion letter at the Louvre Museum in Paris, on the 150th anniversary of the publication of the letter that is considered the beginning of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Even as the stone was being restored in 1999, work was carried out in the gallery so that it would remain on public view.
Reading the Rosetta Stone
Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its decipherment, neither the ancient Egyptian language nor script was understood, knowledge of which had been lost shortly before the end of the Roman Empire. Hieroglyphic writing had been specializing, but in the Ptolemaic period, from the 4th century B.C. C., few Egyptians were able to read it. The monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased entirely after the closure of all non-Christian temples in AD 391. C. by the Roman emperor Theodosius I. The last known inscription, found in Philé and called the Esmet-Akhom inscription, is dated August 24, 396 AD. C.
Hieroglyphics retained their plastic appeal, and classical authors emphasized their appearance, in stark contrast to the Greek and Latin alphabets. For example, in the fifth century AD. The priest Horapolo wrote Hieroglyphica, an explanation of almost two hundred glyphs with numerous errors, which, however, was considered authoritative for a long time and prevented the understanding of Egyptian writing. In the 9th and 10th centuries, Arab historians of medieval Egypt made attempts to decipher it. Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya were the first historians to study the ancient script, which they related to the contemporary Coptic language used by the Christian priests of Egypt. European scholars continued to make unsuccessful attempts to decipher it, especially Johannes Goropius Becanus in the 16th century, Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century, and Jörgen Zoega in the 18th century. The finding of the Rosetta stone in 1799 provided essential missing information, which was gradually revealed by a succession of scholars, eventually allowing Champollion to determine the keys to this mysterious writing.
Greek text
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The Greek text on the Rosetta stone was the starting point. Ancient Greek was well known to scholars, but the details of its use during the Hellenistic period as the language of government of Ptolemaic Egypt were less, as the great Greek papyri had not yet been discovered. Thus, the first translations of the Greek text of the stone show that the translators had difficulties with the historical context and with administrative and religious jargon. The antiquarian Stephen Weston orally presented the English translation of the Greek text at a meeting of the London Society of Antiquaries in April 1802. Two of the lithographic copies made in Egypt had meanwhile reached the Institut de France in Paris in 1801, where the bookseller and antiquarian Gabriel de La Porte du Theil set to work on a translation from the Greek. However, Napoleon moved it elsewhere and had to leave his unfinished work in the hands of a colleague, the also historian Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon, who in 1803 published for the first time a translation of the Greek text, both in French and Latin for ensure its wide dissemination.
In Cambridge the philologist Richard Porson worked on the missing corner of the Greek text and suggested a possible reconstruction that was quickly circulated by the Society of Antiquaries through impressions of the inscription. Almost at the same time, in Göttingen (Germany) the archaeologist Christian Gottlob Heyne made a new translation more reliable than Ameilhon's from one of the impressions from England. It was first published in 1803 and reprinted by the Society of Antiquaries, along with Weston's English translation, Colonel Turner's account, and other documents, in a special edition of their journal Archaeologia in 1811.
Demotic text
At the time of the stone's discovery, Swedish diplomat and scholar Johan David Åkerblad was working on a little-known script recently discovered in Egypt, which came to be called Demotic. He called it "cursive Coptic" because, although it bore few similarities to the later Coptic script, he was convinced that it was used to somehow record the Coptic language, derived directly from the ancient Egyptian language. The French orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, who had been discussing this work with Åkerblad, received in 1801 from Jean-Antoine Chaptal, the French Minister of the Interior, one of the first lithographic prints of the Rosetta Stone and realized that that the intermediate text was that same writing. He and Åkerblad went to work, both focused on the middle text and assuming that it was an alphabetic script. They tried, in comparison with the Greek, to identify within the unknown text where the Hellenic names should be. In 1802 Silvestre de Sacy informed Chaptal that he had identified five names ("Alexandros", "Alexandreia", "Ptolemaios", "Arsinoe" and the title of Ptolemy, "Epiphanes") and, meanwhile, Åkerblad published an alphabet of 29 letters, more than half of which were correct, which he had identified from the Greek names in the demotic text. However, both scholars were unable to identify the remaining characters in the intermediate text, which as we now know it contains ideographic symbols along with phonetic ones.
Hieroglyphic text
Silvestre de Sacy stopped working on the stone, but made another contribution. In 1811, prompted by discussions with a Chinese student about Chinese writing, he considered a suggestion made to him by the Danish archaeologist Georg Zoëga in 1797 that foreign names in Egyptian hieroglyphics might be spelled phonetically. He also recalled that earlier, in 1761, the French archaeologist Jean-Jacques Barthélemy had suggested that the characters inside hieroglyphic cartouches were proper names. Thus, when Thomas Young, Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society of London, wrote to him about the stone in 1814, Silvestre de Sacy responded with the suggestion that when attempting to read hieroglyphic text he should look at the cartouches that should contain the names. Greek and try to identify phonetic characters in them.
Young did, with two results that paved the way for the final decipherment. He discovered in the hieroglyphic text the phonetic characters “ptolmes”, which were used to write the Greek name “Ptolemaios”. He also noticed that these characters resembled the equivalents in the demotic script, and went on to point out another 80 similarities between the hieroglyphic and demotic texts on the stone, which was an important discovery because the two were thought to be totally different. This led him to correctly deduce that the demotic script was only partly phonetic, and that it also contained ideographic characters that imitated hieroglyphs. Young's new ideas were important in the long article "Egypt" which he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1819. However, he made no further progress.
In 1814 Young had first exchanged correspondence about the stone with Jean-François Champollion, a French professor in Grenoble who had written a scholarly paper on ancient Egypt. Champollion saw in 1822 copies of the short hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions on the Philae obelisk, on which the British adventurer and Egyptologist William John Bankes had tentatively noted the names "Ptolemy" and "Kleopatra" in both languages, from which Champollion identified the phonetic characters as "k l e o p a t r a ". On this basis and that of the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone he quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters that appear, in his own handwriting, in his famous letter to M. Dacier, sent at the end of 1822 to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the Academy of Ancient Inscriptions and Languages, and immediately published by the Academy. This letter marks the true turning point for the understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs, not only for the table of the alphabet and the main text, but also for its epilogue, in which Champollion points out that not only Greek names appear in phonetic characters, but also native Egyptian names. During 1823 he confirmed this by identifying the names of the pharaohs Ramesses and Tutmosis written on much older cartouches copied by Bankes at Abu Simbel and sent to Champollion by the architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot. From this point the stories about the Rosetta stone and the decipherment of the hieroglyphs diverge, as Champollion drew on many other texts to develop the first ancient Egyptian grammar and a dictionary of hieroglyphs, both published after his death. br/>
Later work
Current work on the stone is focused on fully understanding the inscriptions and their context by comparing each of the three versions with each other. In 1824 the classicist scholar Antoine-Jean Letronne undertook to produce a new literal translation of the Greek text for Champollion's use, and Champollion in return promised an analysis of all the points on which the three versions seemed to differ. After Champollion's sudden death in 1832 his analysis project could not be found, and Letronne's work stalled. On the death in 1838 of François Salvolini, Champollion's former student and assistant, this and other lost projects were found among his papers, further proving that Salvolini's 1837 publication on the stone was plagiarism. Letronne was finally able to complete his commentary on the Greek text and its new French translation, which appeared in 1841. During the 1850s two German Egyptologists, Heinrich Karl Brugsch and Max Uhlemann, produced revised Latin translations based on the demotic and hieroglyphic texts.
The question of which is the original text from which the other two are translations remains controversial. In 1841 Letronne attempted to prove that the original was the Greek version, the language of Egyptian government under Ptolemaic rule. Among recent authors, John Ray has asserted that "hieroglyphs were the most important inscriptions on stone: they were there for the gods and the most learned of their priests to read". Philippe Derchain and Heinz Josef Thissen have argued that all three These versions were created simultaneously, while Stephen Quirke sees in the decree "an intricate fusion of three vital textual traditions". Richard Parkinson notes that the hieroglyphic version, moving away from archaic formalism, occasionally falls into language close to the demotic register. that the priests used most often in daily life. The fact that the three versions cannot be compared word for word helps to understand why their decipherment has been more difficult than initially expected, especially for those scholars who were waiting for a exact bilingual key for Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Rivalries
The history of the decipherment of the Rosetta stone has been marked by disputes about precedence and plagiarism among its scholars, even before the Salvolini affair. Thomas Young's work is acknowledged in Champollion's letter to M. Dacier in 1822, but incompletely: for example, James Browne, a sub-editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica who had published Young's article of 1819, he anonymously contributed a series of articles to the Edinburgh Review in 1823, praising Young's work and denouncing Champollion's "unscrupulous" plagiarism. Julius Klaproth translated these articles into French and edited them in book form in 1827, while the publication of Young's own work in 1823 reaffirmed his contributions. The untimely deaths of Young and Champollion, in 1829 and 1832 respectively, did not put an end to these disputes, and the work on the stele published in 1904 by Ernest Wallis Budge, Curator of the British Museum, placed special emphasis on Young's contributions to contrast with those of Champollion. In the early 1970s French visitors to the museum complained that Champollion's portrait was smaller than one of Young on an adjacent information panel, while English visitors felt otherwise. In reality both portraits were the same size.
Petitions for repatriation to Egypt
In July 2003, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the British Museum, Egypt for the first time requested the return of the Rosetta stone. Zahi Hawass, the then head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, called for the stone to be repatriated to the country. Speaking to reporters, he urged: "If the British want to be remembered, if they want to get their reputation back, they should offer to return the Rosetta Stone because it is the symbol of our Egyptian identity." Two years later, in Paris, it was repeated. the petition including the stone as one of the many essential objects belonging to the Egyptian cultural heritage, a list that also included the iconic bust of Nefertiti from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, a statue of Hemiunu, architect of the Great Pyramid of Giza and belonging to the Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim, the Dendera zodiac in the Louvre in Paris, and the bust of Anjaf in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2005 the British Museum presented Egypt with a life-size replica of the stele, initially on display in the renovated National Museum of Rashid, close to where the stela was found. In November of that same year, Hawass suggested a three-month loan of the Rosetta stone, at while reiterating that the final objective was its definitive return, but in December 2009 he proposed to stop claiming its return if the British Museum lent it for three months for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza in 2013. Like John D. Ray has noted, "The day will come when the stone will have spent more time in the British Museum than it did in Rosetta".
There is strong opposition among national museums to the return of objects of international cultural importance such as the Rosetta stone. In this regard, in response to repeated Greek requests for the return of the Elgin Marbles and similar requests to other museums around the world, in 2002 some thirty major museums from various countries, including the British Museum, issued a joint statement stating: "objects acquired in earlier times must be considered in the light of the different sensibilities and values of that bygone age"; "Museums serve not just the citizens of one nation, but people of all nations."
Idiomatic use
The term «Rosetta stone» has been used idiomatically to define crucial evidence for the process of deciphering encoded information, especially when a small but representative sample is recognized as the key to understanding of a larger whole. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first figurative use of the term appeared in the 1902 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica in an entry analyzing glucose chemical. An almost literal use of the phrase appears in H. G. Wells' 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come), in which the protagonist finds a manuscript written in shorthand that provides him with a key to understanding scattered handwritten and typewritten information. Perhaps its most important and prominent use in scientific literature was by Nobel Prize winner Theodor W. Hänsch in a 1979 article in the magazine Scientif ic American on spectroscopy, where he says that "the spectrum of hydrogen atoms has proven to be the Rosetta stone of modern physics: once this pattern of lines is deciphered, much more can be understood." ».
Since then the term has been widely used in other contexts. For example, full knowledge of the set of human leukocyte antigens has been described as "the Rosetta stone of immunology", and the cruciferous plant Arabidopsis thaliana has also been called "the Rosetta stone of immunology". the flowering season." A gamma-ray burst in conjunction with a supernova has been defined as a Rosetta stone for understanding the origin of these ray bursts, and Doppler ultrasonography the equivalent for medical attempts to understand the complex process by which the left ventricle of the human heart can be filled in the various forms of diastolic dysfunction.
The name of the Egyptian stele has also been used to name various forms of translation software. Rosetta Stone is a brand of language learning software created by Rosetta Stone Ltd., US. "Rosetta" is the name of a "dynamic lightweight translator" that enables applications built for a PowerPC processor to run on Apple systems with an x86 processor. "Rosetta" is an online translation tool to assist software localization, developed and maintained by Canonical Ltd. as part of the Launchpad project. Similarly, Rosetta@home is a distributed computing project to predict (or translate) protein structures. The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta project aims to collect all languages currently in danger of disappearing, and has an archive of 1,500 languages. The Rosetta space probe was on a twelve-year mission (2004-2016) to study comet 67P/Churiumov-Guerasimenko in the hope that determining its composition will reveal the origins of the solar system.
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