[Egypt] Rosetta Stone.
Sayed Allam
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian artifact that played a key role in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. It was discovered in 1799 by French soldiers in the town of Rosetta (Rashid), Egypt, during Napoleon’s campaign.
The stone is a granodiorite slab inscribed with a decree issued in 196 BCE during the reign of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. What makes it significant is that the decree is written in three scripts:
- Hieroglyphs (used for religious and formal inscriptions)
- Demotic (the common script of daily life in ancient Egypt)
- Ancient Greek (the language of the ruling class at the time)
Since Greek was well understood, scholars—especially Jean-François Champollion in 1822—were able to use it as a reference to finally decode hieroglyphs, unlocking the secrets of ancient Egyptian writing.
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