Rosetta Stone Documentary - History Facts - Documentary Film

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele engraved with a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC in support of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the top content is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle section Demotic script, and the most affordable Ancient Greek. It gave the essential to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs considering that it provides basically the exact same content in all 3 scripts (with some small differences amongst them).
Although it is believed to have initially been shown within a temple, possibly at close-by Sais, the stone was most likely moved during the very early Christian or middle ages period and was at some point utilized as structure material in the building of Fort Julien near the community of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was rediscovered there in 1799 by a soldier, Pierre-François Bouchard, of the Napoleonic exploration to Egypt. As the initial Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, the Rosetta Stone attracted extensive public interest with its potential to decode this previously untranslated old language. Lithographic duplicates and cast started distributing amongst European museums and scholars. Meanwhile, British soldiers defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, and the initial stone entered British belongings under the Capitulation of Alexandria. Carried to London, it has actually been on show and tell at the British Museum since 1802. It is the most-visited item in the British Museum.
Study of the decree was already under means as the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. It was 20 years, nonetheless, before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was revealed by Jean-François Champollion in Paris in 1822; it took longer still before scholars were able to review Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literary works confidently. Major developments in the decoding were awareness that the stone provided three versions of the exact same text (1799); that the demotic content made use of phonetic characters to spell foreign names (1802); that the hieroglyphic message doinged this as well, and had prevalent resemblances to the demotic (Thomas Young, 1814); which, along with being used for foreign names, phonetic personalities were likewise utilized to lead to native Egyptian words (Champollion, 1822-- 1824).