The Rosetta Stone

Did you know?

March 30, 2020 – Ptolemy V Epiphanes was crowned Pharaoh in 196 BC, but his deeds as ruler are largely eclipsed by how word of his coronation’s anniversary was delivered to the people of Memphis, Egypt. Priests carved a message cataloging Ptolemy’s noble deeds on stone in three languages: hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic, and ancient Greek. When French engineers discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799, the language of Egyptian hieroglyphics was still a frustrating and seemingly unsolvable mystery to scholars.

An English physicist named Thomas Young was the first to understand that some of the hieroglyphs on the stone phonetically spelled out Ptolemy’s name. Using Young’s work as a foundation, French scholar Jean-François Champollion studied how non-Egyptian ruler names were written out in hieroglyphs and created a phonetic alphabet. In 1824 Champollion made his final breakthrough, and the secrets of ancient hieroglyphs were finally unlocked to the modern world.

This otherwise minor decree has become one of the most famous and celebrated artifacts in archeological history. A replica of the Rosetta Stone is just one of many ancient artifacts displayed in Discovery Park of America’s Enlightenment Gallery.

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