Rosetta Stone is Found
Hey Sparkles! Happy Monday! For today’s Monday Moment post, I am writing about the Rosetta Stone being found.
The Rosetta Stone is a stone with writing on it in three different scripts, hiroglyphics, demotics, and Greek. The reason for the Rosetta Stone being written in three scripts is because when it was written, there were three scripts being used in Egypt.
The first was hieroglyphic which was the script used for important or religious documents.
The second was demotic which was the common script of Egypt.
The third was Greek which was the language of the rulers of Egypt at that time.
The Rosetta Stone was written in all three scripts so that the priests, government officials and rulers of Egypt could read what it said.
Although it was carved in 196 BC, it was not found until 1799, by a group of French soldiers who were trying to rebuild a fort. The Rosetta Stone was found in a village called Rosetta, and this is where it got its name from.
The Rosetta Stone is a text written by a group of priests in Egypt to honour the Egyptian pharaoh. It lists all of the things that the pharaoh has done that are good for the priests and the people of Egypt.
After many years of studying the Rosetta Stone and other examples of ancient Egyptian writing, Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822. He was able to figure out what the seven demotic signs in coptic were. By looking at how these signs were used in coptic he was able to work out what they stood for. Then he began tracing these demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs.
By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he could make educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs stood for.
Well, that’s all for today, Sparkles. I hope you enjoyed this historical tidbit of the day. Thanks for reading, and Sparkles away!
