HISTORY's Moments in Media: Reading the Rosetta Stone -- The World's Most Important Ancient Media

The stone was found 222 years ago this month on July 15 1799 by French army engineers who were part of Napoleon39s Egyptian advance The campaign was the emperor39s effort to control the eastern Mediterranean region and ultimately to confront the British in India Working to build an addition to Fort Julien near the Nile Delta town of Rashid also known as Rosetta the engineers discovered the stone built into an old wall It was the French officer in charge of the project PierreFranamp231ois Bouchard who recognized the significance of what they39d foundTwo years later in 1801 when the British defeated the French and Napoleon39s army was turned back the Treaty of Alexandria transferred the stone to British control In 1802 it was shipped back to England It has lived ever since at the British Museum except for a period during World War I when it along with other artifacts was moved for safekeeping to a nearby Tube station to protect it from heavy German bombs It sits not far from the Elgin Marbles taken from the Parthenon in Athens and other spoils of colonialismThe contentamp160of the stone39s inscription isn39t really that interesting A decree by council of Egyptian priests it39s an endorsement of the good deeds and religious devotion of the young pharaoh commemorating his ascension to the throne What makes it notable is that the same message is inscribed three times on the stone once in hieroglyphics the priestly language equivalent to a Latin inscription in today39s Catholic Church once in demotic script the everyday language of ancient Egypt and once more in ancient Greek the language used by Egypt39s rulers and administrators That parallel text is what allowed scholars to crack the codeHieroglyphics had gone out of use around the start of the fourth century By the modern age no one knew how to read or translate them But scholars did know how to read ancient Greek When the French found the Rosetta stone being used as a building block it was no longer fully intact But it contained 14 lines of hieroglyphic script and by comparing that script to the ancient Greek it was possible to start to figure out translationsThe British physicist Thomas Young made the first big steps around 1814 He was able to determine that some glyphs known as cartouches ovals with other symbols inside were phonetic spellings of royal names including Ptolemy39s In the 1820s French linguist JeanFranamp231ois Champollion expanded on that insight realizing that hieroglyphics weren39t simply pictographs as had previously been assumed but rather combined picture and phonetic writing They revealed the actual sounds of ancient Egyptian language By 1824 he was able to fully translate ancient hieroglyphicsThe writing on the Rosetta stone which is a bit less than four feet tall and about two and a half feet wide includes another interesting detail According to the text this wasn39t the only version of the priests39 decree praising Ptolemy It says that identical copies were to be placed in every major temple across Egypt And since the French discovery more than 200 years ago other copies of the decree have been found In other words the Rosetta stone isn39t merely worldchanging ancient media it39s worldchanging ancient mass mediaClick the social buttons above or below to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writersamp160

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HISTORY's Moments in Media: Reading the Rosetta Stone -- The World's Most Important Ancient Media

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HISTORY's Moments in Media: Reading the Rosetta Stone -- The World's Most Important Ancient Media

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