The Rosetta Stone
In 1799, when Napoleon's army was dismantling a wall in Rashid, Egypt, they discovered the Rosetta Stone. Little did they know that this 11-inch thick piece of rock would be one of the greatest discoveries in history! It contained Egyptian scripture, with Greek also on the stone. This was used to decode the once lost Egyptian writing system.Before the 1800's, attempts at trying to uncover the secrets held by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics found on walls inside numerous tombs were useless. The pictures were falsely believed to be symbolic, representing some sort of object or idea. Something soon changed all of this misconception. 1799 was the year of a great breakthrough in Egyptology. French troops, under Napoleon's command, were destroying a wall when they found a black, basalt stone. The stone was inscribed with three different forms of writing: Egyptian hieroglyphics, a shorthand form of hieroglyphs, and Greek written in 196 BC. The Rosetta Stone then became instrumental in decrypting the long forgotten Egyptian writing system.The stone was first discovered near Rosetta, Egypt, by one of Napoleon's soldiers, named variously as Bouchard, during his expedition to Egypt in August of 1799. In no time, t
Toronto, Canada: Longmans Canada Limited, 1969. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1985. The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone - Key to Ancient Egypt. By 1818, Champollion had successfully concluded that though some signs were basically ideograms, many of the glyphs had phonetic value, meaning the ancient Egyptian script was at least partially alphabetic. Young's main contribution to Egyptology was published in the 1824 Encyclopedia Britannica, which described his findings. Of the phonetic values that he assigned to hieroglyphs, five were correct (p, t, i, n, and f). (Claiborne 96) Both were published after his death, which occurred on March 4, 1832, the first book almost four years after his untimely death due to a stroke. After many years of perseverance, Champollion finally translated the stone in 1822.
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