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FOUNDATIONS  OF  THE   BIBLE

The Rosetta Stone
 

The name Rosetta is attached to the stone of Rosette.
This is a compact basalt slab (114x72x28 cm) that was found in July 1799
in the small Egyptian village Rosette (Raschid), which is located in the western delta of the Nile.
Today the stone is kept at the British Museum in London.
It contains three inscriptions that represent a single text in three different variants of script,
a decree of the priests of  Memphis in honor of  Ptolemaios V. (196 b.c.).

 

The top portion -
the text appears in form of
hieroglyphs -
(the script of  the official and religious texts)
The middle portion -
the text appears in form of
Demotic -
 (everyday Egyptian script)
 
The lower portion -
the text appears in Greek

Thomas Young,  a British physicist,  and Jean Francois Champollion,  a French Egyptologist,  collaborated to decipher the hieroglyphic and demotic texts by comparing them with the known Greek text.  From this meager starting point a generation of  Egyptologists eventually managed to read most everything that remains of  the Egyptians' ancient writings.

Picture is From The Rosetta Web Site

 

Bibliography

 
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