The Rosetta Stone

The decree itself is not a great work of literature. It is a piece of institutional business, issued at Memphis in 196 BC by a council of Egyptian priests, confirming the royal cult of Ptolemy V Epiphanes in return for a set of concessions. The king had remitted certain taxes and made grants to the temples; the priests, in exchange, undertook to honour him. The final clause instructs that the decree be inscribed in all three scripts and set up in every temple of the first, second and third rank. This was a mass-produced document. Fragments of related decrees have been found elsewhere.

That ordinariness is precisely what made it useful. A ceremonial text might have been paraphrased loosely between versions. A legal and fiscal document had to say the same thing in each script, because the details mattered to the people administering them.

What had been lost was not the Egyptian language — Coptic, the last stage of it, survived in liturgical use. What had been lost was the ability to read the scripts. By the late fourth century AD the temple institutions that trained scribes in hieroglyphs had closed, and the knowledge went with them. For roughly fourteen hundred years, Europeans looked at Egyptian writing and saw symbols. The dominant assumption, reinforced by a fifth-century treatise attributed to Horapollo, was that hieroglyphs were purely ideographic: each sign a small allegory, a picture-puzzle of meaning. That assumption was the trap, and it held for centuries.

The stone was found in July 1799 during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, in the course of work on a fort near the town of Rosetta — modern Rashid, in the Delta. It was not lying in a temple. It had been reused as building material, which is how a great deal of Egyptian stone survived at all. The French scholars attached to the expedition recognised immediately what a trilingual inscription might be worth and took impressions and casts, which circulated in Europe well before the stone did.

The stone itself changed hands in 1801, when French forces in Egypt capitulated to the British. It has been in the British Museum since 1802.

The decipherment took another two decades and two people who did not much like each other. Thomas Young, an English polymath, made the crucial early breaks: he established that the cartouches — the oval rings around certain groups of signs — enclosed royal names, and that at least some of the signs inside them were phonetic. He identified the name of Ptolemy. He also did substantial work on the Demotic. But Young held on to the idea that phonetic spelling was a special case, used for foreign names, within a system that was otherwise symbolic.

Jean-François Champollion, working from the same material plus a much deeper knowledge of Coptic, took the further step. In 1822 he demonstrated that the phonetic principle ran through the script generally — that hieroglyphs recorded sounds as well as ideas, and that the language they recorded was ancestral to the Coptic he already knew. His comparison of the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra, which share several sounds, let him assign values that then held elsewhere. He announced the result in a letter to the Académie in September 1822.

Neither man worked from the Rosetta Stone alone. Other bilingual material, particularly the obelisk from Philae, was in play. But the stone was the anchor, and it remains the object the whole episode is told through.