The Rosetta Stone has become something people talk about. I had the chance to see the real thing recently, in the BritishMuseum? in LondonTown. Here are some facts as background. -- JohnFletcher
- The RosettaStone has the same inscription in three languages (Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphics). It was not written as a comparative text, or with an eye to the future. The inscription is a decree about the relationship between the Greek king and the Egyptian priests at the time, 196 BC.
- The RosettaStone was not originally at Rosetta. It ended up there after having been reused in a building.
- It was rediscovered by French soldiers in 1799, and then captured by British soldiers.
- The inscriptions were used in the nineteenth century to decode the Egyptian hieroglyphic script. This is the event which has led to the fame of the stone.
The point of this is that there was no
intention by the originators to provide a parallel text as a crossindex. That is an accident of the survival of the stone.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
Also The Rosetta Stone Richard Parkinson, ISBN 0-7141-5021-5 , British Museum Press, 2005 has more information. The BritishMuseum? also sell a mouse mat copy of it!
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CategoryHistory
Rosetta Stone