{"id":341,"date":"2009-08-18T10:21:24","date_gmt":"2009-08-18T10:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/?p=341"},"modified":"2009-08-20T21:46:46","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T21:46:46","slug":"the-rosetta-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/18\/the-rosetta-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rosetta Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TheIn London recently, I dropped by to see The Rosetta Stone<\/a> at the British Museum<\/a>. This slab of granodiorite<\/a> is so famous that I could barely get near it for all the people craning over each other to take a close look.<\/p>\n

So why were all those people so eager to look at a big stone? And why is it so important?<\/p>\n

Weighing in at around three-quarters of a ton, the stone is approximately 118cm high, 77cm wide and 30cm deep. Discovered by Napoleon<\/a>\u2019s army in 1799, the Rosetta Stone is named after the place it was found \u2013 near el-Rashid<\/a> (Rosetta) in present day Egypt. When Napoleon\u2019s army was defeated, the stone became the property of the English, and has been on display<\/a> in the British Museum since 1802 (although its presence is debated<\/a>). <\/p>\n

The Rosetta Stone is inscribed with three columns of different languages \u2013 Greek<\/a>, Demotic<\/a> and hieroglyphics<\/a>, which all have the same message. The inscription on the stone is a decree passed by a council of priests \u2013 but it\u2019s not so much what is written that\u2019s important (although it does tell us a lot), it\u2019s what knowledge can be gained from the inscription. <\/p>\n

The decree is inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration). The importance of this to Egyptology is immense. Soon after the end of the fourth century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Source: British Museum<\/a>). <\/p>\n

As you can see, it is hugely important to language, and the term \u201cRosetta Stone\u201d has become idiomatic <\/p>\n

as something that is a critical key to the process of decryption or translation of a difficult encoding of information. (source<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Its importance is highlighted with the Rosetta Project, which I will be looking at in my next post\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In London recently, I dropped by to see The Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. This slab of granodiorite is so famous that I could barely get near it for all the people craning over each other to take a close look. So why were all those people so eager to look at a big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,176,175,177,52],"tags":[183,182,184,181,179,180,178],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-demotic","category-greek","category-hieroglyphics","category-idioms","tag-british-museum","tag-egypt","tag-egyptology","tag-el-rashid","tag-grandiorite","tag-napoleon","tag-rosetta-stone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":345,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions\/345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}