Today is believed to be the day in 1799 when French troops in northern Egypt discovered a stone that unlocked a huge amount of knowledge about the ancient world.
Or at least it would, after they spent like two decades figuring out what it said.
It’s known today as the Rosetta Stone because it was discovered in a place Europeans called Rosetta.
In Arabic it’s called Rashid.
This all happened during a French military campaign to make Egypt its colony.
That didn’t end up happening, but Napoleon had also ordered his troops to seek out as many important cultural and historical objects as they could find, and shuttle them back to France (never mind who these objects belonged to).
Likely with help from a local laborer, the French soldiers spotted such an object in the wall of a run-down fort from the 15th Century.
At the end of the war, English forces would take it back to the British Museum, where it has been pretty much ever since, under protest by the government of Egypt.
It was a large black slab of stone, close to four feet long and about 2 1/2 feet wide, and it had a lot of writing on it in three different languages.
One was ancient Greek, which scholars knew.
Another was Egyptian hieroglyphics, the five thousand year old pictographs used mostly by priests and higher-ups.
The third was Demotic Egyptian, a kind of shorthand version of hieroglyphics for the rest of society.
And the Greek section explained that all three sections had the same message, which meant that scholars could match the three languages up and finally decode the Egyptian languages they’d long wanted to understand.
The first scholars thought that would be easy; two weeks of work and they’d have the whole job finished.
Maybe if they had looked at the research that Arabic thinkers like Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah had already done, they might have cracked it that fast.
It took them over 20 years to figure it all out, mostly because the hieroglyphic writing was largely, but not entirely a picture language; some of the writing, like what was inside the oval cartouches, were names and were listed phonetically.
Two men, Thomas Young of England and Jean-François Champollion of France, each made key discoveries on their own to decode the ancient language.
Which meant the modern world could read ancient hieroglyphic writings… which was a lot more exciting than reading the actual text of the Rosetta Stone.
The message in three languages is basically propaganda, telling the people of Egypt that their then-king, Ptolemy V, was a great guy who had done so many wonderful things and should be worshipped like the god on Earth that he was.
Just because it was important didn’t mean it was a great read.
Atchison, Kansas is in the middle of its annual celebration of its most famous resident.
The three-day Amelia Earhart Festival includes something new this year: the Amazing Strings Ensemble will give the first public performance of a musical composition called “Inspired By Amelia,” with five movements that follow the course of Earhart’s life.
Or you could call it her flight path.
Rosetta Stone found (History.com)
Back our show on Patreon in any language you like
Photo by Nichola Czyz, Portable Antiquities Scheme via Flickr/Creative Commons
