Rosetta Stone. Photo by Leon Mauldin. British Museum.
Today I had opportunity in the British Museum to photograph numerous biblical and historical artifacts, including the Rosetta Stone. The inscriptions on this stone turned out to be the key to deciphering Egyptian Hieroglyphics as well as the ancient Egyptians Demotic language.
The Rosetta Stone was discovered by a French officer in 1799 in the western delta of Egypt. It was surrendered to the British during the Napoleonic war and was brought to the British Museum in 1802. The stone is carved on black basalt and is valuable because it contains the same message in two forms of ancient Egyptian writing and one in Greek. The Egyptian writing at the top of the stone is hieroglyphic writing whilst the second section is demotic Egyptian; the third section is in Greek capital letters (know as “uncial). The Greek was translated relatively easily proved to be part of a citation by Egyptian priests in Memphis to celebrate the first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V in 196 BC The two Egyptian scripts were found to be the equivalent text and, once deciphered,, this helped scholars to understand ancient Egyptian writing (Edwards and Anderson, Through The British Museum–with the Bible, p. 78
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