What Does The Rosetta Stone Say? - Translating Egyptian Hieroglyphs
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient stone monument (also known as a "stele") with a message about Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ptolemy V inscribed onto it. Find out more about how the Rosetta Stone was discovered here.
Three forms of writing on the Stone
The message on the Rosetta Stone was written in three different forms of writing (or "scripts"). The first form of writing is hieroglyphs. This was an Egyptian script often used by priests. The second form of writing is Demotic. This Egyptian script was often seen as the "language of the people" because it was used by common Egyptian people on a daily basis. The third form of writing is Ancient Greek. The rulers of Egypt at this time were descended from the Ancient Greeks (after Alexander The Great's conquest), so this was the form of writing used by Egyptian royalty.
Learning to read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Historians used the three scripts on the Rosetta Stone to learn to read and understand Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time. Hieroglyphs had fallen out of use around the 4th Century AD and knowledge of how to read them had disappeared as time passed. Luckily, having the same message written in three different scripts on the Stone meant that historians could learn to read the hieroglyphic text.
Who translated the Egyptian Hieroglyphs?
An English historian called Thomas Young used his knowledge of the Greek language to find translations of names, such as Ptolomy, in the hieroglyphs. Following Young's discovery, a French historian, Jean-Francois Champollion, used the Coptic language (a later version of the Egyptian language) to work out most of the rest of the hieroglyphic writing. It is because of the hard work of these early Egyptologists that we can now understand Egyptian hieroglyphs. You can even learn to write in Egyptian hieroglyphs here.
So what does the Rosetta Stone say?
The message, inscribed on the Rosetta Stone in 196 BC, is a decree (an official message) about Pharaoh Ptolemy V. It says that the priests at the temple in Memphis in Egypt supported the Pharaoh. It translates as a bit of a list of all of the good things Pharaoh Ptolemy V did for the priests and the people of Egypt.
The message on the Rosetta Stone also claims that an exact copy of this message must be placed in every temple across Egypt so they could spread the news far and wide. The Rosetta Stone wasn't found in Memphis where the original message was made by the council of priests. So the Stone must be one of the copies spread across the kingdom.
