What is the Rosetta Stone? How it unlocked hieroglyphs

The Rosetta Stone is a broken slab of dark granodiorite inscribed in 196 BC with a decree of Egyptian priests honoring King Ptolemy V, written out three times: in hieroglyphs, in Demotic, the everyday Egyptian script, and in ancient Greek. Because scholars could read the Greek, the stone gave them a parallel text to work from, and it became the starting point for deciphering hieroglyphs, which no one had read for about 1,400 years.

In short

• The stone carries one text in two languages and three scripts: Egyptian, written in hieroglyphs and in Demotic, and Greek.
• Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion used the royal names on it to work out that hieroglyphs could stand for sounds; Champollion showed in 1822–1824 that the script mixes sound signs and meaning signs.
• Found by French soldiers in 1799 and taken by Britain in 1801, it has been in the British Museum since 1802, and calls for its return to Egypt are still argued.

What does the Rosetta Stone say?

It is a priestly decree, issued by a council of priests at Memphis and dated 27 March 196 BC, in the ninth year of the reign of Ptolemy V. The Ptolemies were a Greek-speaking dynasty that had ruled Egypt since the death of Alexander the Great, the same family as the later Cleopatra. The decree lists the king's good deeds, such as tax relief and gifts to temples, and in return sets out honors for him, including statues and festivals. It ordered that copies be set up in temples across the country in "sacred writing," "native writing" and "Greek writing," which is why it has three scripts.

The stone is a fragment of a larger slab, about 112 cm tall and weighing about 760 kg, according to the overview of the stone on Wikipedia. The top is broken off, so only 14 lines of hieroglyphs survive, against 32 of Demotic and 54 of Greek. What made it valuable was not what it said, which was routine, but that it said the same thing in a language scholars could already read.

How was it found, and how did it reach London?

In July 1799, during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, found the stone built into an old wall. The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, saw that it might be important, and it was sent to the scholars Napoleon had brought with him. Copies of the inscriptions soon circulated in Europe.

When British and Ottoman forces defeated the French army in Egypt, the 1801 Capitulation of Alexandria handed over the antiquities the French had collected. The stone landed at Portsmouth in February 1802 and was in the British Museum before the end of that year, where it has been on display almost ever since.

How did the Rosetta Stone help decipher hieroglyphs?

Not in one stroke. It took more than two decades, several scholars, and texts from well beyond the stone.

1. The starting assumption, and its problem. For centuries, European scholars had believed hieroglyphs were pure symbols, each a picture of an idea, with no sounds at all. The 17th-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher produced elaborate "translations" on that basis that were almost entirely wrong, as the history of the decipherment records.
2. The cartouches. Some hieroglyphs on the stone are enclosed in ovals, called cartouches. The Greek text names Ptolemy many times, so scholars guessed the cartouche held his name. A foreign Greek name would have to be spelled out by sound, so these signs, at least, should be phonetic.
3. Young's progress, from 1814. The English physician and physicist Thomas Young matched the cartouche to "Ptolemaios" and gave sound values to several of its signs. He also showed that Demotic was related to hieroglyphs, not a separate system. He kept, however, to the old view that ordinary Egyptian words were written with symbols, and sounds were used only for foreign names.
4. A second name. In January 1822 Champollion saw a copy of the inscriptions on an obelisk from Philae, which held a cartouche that should spell "Kleopatra." Ptolemaios and Kleopatra share the sounds p, t, o and l. If the signs were sounds, the same signs should turn up in both names in the right places: p first in one and fifth in the other, l fourth in one and second in the other. They did, and so did o. The t was written with different signs in the two names, which he took, correctly, to be two signs for the same sound. That check, with letters falling where the Greek spelling predicted, gave him sound values he could test on the names of other Greek and Roman rulers.
5. The breakthrough, September 1822. How Champollion took the next step is mostly not recorded at the time. According to his biographer Hermine Hartleben, writing in 1906, it came on 14 September 1822, as he studied new copies of cartouches from Abu Simbel, carved centuries before any Greek ruled Egypt. One began with a sun disk, which in Coptic, the late form of the Egyptian language he spoke fluently, would be re or ra, "sun." It ended with the sign he already read as s from Ptolemy's name, doubled. A name of the form Ra-?-s-s suggested Ramesses, with m in the middle, and on the Rosetta Stone the same signs stood where the Greek text had the word for "birth," Coptic mise. Another cartouche began with an ibis, the bird of the god Thoth, followed by the same sign: Thutmose. (The middle sign in fact stands for two consonants, ms, something he did not yet see.) In Coptic, mis is related to giving birth, so the names meant something like "Ra is the one who bore him." Here was a native Egyptian name written with a picture read for its meaning and signs read for their sounds, side by side.
6. Publication. Champollion set out his readings of the Greek and Roman royal names in the Lettre à M. Dacier, read to the French Academy on 27 September 1822, with Young in the audience; it ended by hinting that sound signs had been used for names from early in Egyptian history. In his Précis of 1824 he showed that hieroglyphs mix sound signs, signs that stand for whole words, and silent signs that indicate the kind of word, the same three kinds found in cuneiform.

How much Champollion owed Young is still debated, as it was by the two men at the time: Champollion said he had reached his conclusions independently, while Young felt his own work had gone unacknowledged.

Why was the Rosetta Stone so important?

Because hieroglyphs then opened 3,000 years of Egyptian writing: royal inscriptions, tomb texts, letters, medical papyri and literature. Before 1822, ancient Egypt was known almost entirely through what Greek and Roman writers and the Bible said about it. After, Egyptians could be read in their own words, and Egyptology became a modern field of study. The approach, a bilingual text plus a known later form of the language, is also how cuneiform was cracked, from a trilingual cliff inscription in Persia.

Hieroglyphs themselves are not an alphabet, though a handful of their signs each stood for a single consonant. Those one-consonant signs matter to the story of where the alphabet came from, because the earliest alphabet was drawn from Egyptian signs. And the decipherment is a model of how historians weigh evidence: a guess about the cartouches, tested against names that had to fall in predicted places.

The name has become a word in English for any key to a hard problem, and it is used for language-learning software, a European space probe and much else.

Should the Rosetta Stone go back to Egypt?

Still argued

Zahi Hawass, a former Egyptian antiquities minister, called for its return in 2003, calling it the icon of Egyptian identity, and has repeated the call since. In 2022, the Associated Press reported, a petition he led had more than 100,000 signatures and one led by the archaeologist Monica Hanna had 4,200; both argue that the stone was taken as a spoil of war and that Egyptians had no say in the 1801 agreement. The British Museum answered that the 1801 treaty includes the signature of a representative of Egypt, an Ottoman admiral who fought alongside the British against the French; that Egypt's government had not formally requested it; and that 21 of the 28 known copies of the decree remain in Egypt. Supporters of the museum add that it is seen there by millions of visitors free of charge. Critics answer that an Ottoman officer did not speak for Egyptians and that few Egyptians can travel to London to see it. In 2005 the museum gave Egypt a full-size replica, and Hawass has at times proposed a loan rather than permanent return.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: why did a decree saying routine things turn out to be one of the most useful texts ever found?
• How did comparing the names Ptolemaios and Kleopatra show that hieroglyphs could stand for sounds?
• What did the Ramesses cartouche reveal that Young's theory had missed?

Sources

• Rosetta Stone — Wikipedia
• Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts — Wikipedia
• Jean-François Champollion — Wikipedia
• Egyptians call on British Museum to return the Rosetta Stone — Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2022