The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, Great Russell Street, London.
NGR: TQ 3010 8160. A large lump of black granodiorite known as the ‘Rosetta Stone’ which has a flat side bearing ancient Egyptian inscriptions (hieroglyphs) is housed in the British Museum on Great Russell Street, Holborn, London. Granodiorite is similar to granite. It is part of a larger stone stele and has three different types of writing, 100 lines altogether, in the form of a decree from priests acting on behalf of the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy V (Epiphanes Eucharistos), who was only 13 at the time and reigned 204-180 BC. The stone was discovered in the ruined fort of St Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta in 1799 by Pierre Francois Bouchardin, a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army. After the treaty of Alexandria and the French Capitulation in 1801 the Rosetta Stone came into English hands, and in 1802 it was shipped over to England and later that same year presented to the British Museum by King George III – the stone has been on display in the Museum ever since. There are many other ancient Egyptian artefacts on display in the museum’s many rooms and also artefacts from Biblical (the Old Testament), Roman, Greeco-Roman and Early Christian times and periods of history, as well as artefacts from many other world cultures – all being displayed in various rooms and galleries within the museum. There are also many, many ancient manuscripts, books in their thousands, and documents to see in the museum’s library, so all-in-all it’s well worth visiting.
Bruce Norman writing for his BBC book in 1987 tells us: “On 24th July 1798, Napoleon had invaded and entered Cairo, victorious. Despite the destruction by Nelson of the French fleet at the battle of the Nile a week later, France remained firmly in possession. As well as an army of military men there was an army of cartographers, engineers, scientists and academics: the Commission of Arts and Sciences, whose job was to investigate and record, collect and classify information about Egypt that would be essential for the permanent establishment of colonial rule. The operation lasted three years before the French were finally forced to withdraw, taking with them volumes of notes and not a few antiquities. The British tried to relieve them of their booty but were only successful with a piece of black basalt covered with Greek and other writings which the French had discovered at Rosetta in 1799. The Rosetta Stone, famous as the means whereby the Frenchman Champollion was eventually able to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, was placed on display in the British Museum in London. It whetted the public’s appetite, as well as the museum’s for more antiquities of the same kind. That appetite was soon to be satisfied.”
The King’s England (1949) regarding the Ptolemies says of the Rosetta Stone: “The most important of their legacies lies here in a simple decree commemorating the coronation of Ptolemy the Fifth. Inscribed on a plain black stone, world-famous as the Rosetta Stone, and found by one of Napoleon’s soldiers in 1798, are a hundred mysterious lines: 14 lines of hieroglyphics, 32 lines of the characters used in Egypt for writing books, and 54 lines of Greek. The stone was a mystery, for the meaning of hieroglyphics, and even of book-writing, had been lost for centuries, so that the history of ancient Egypt was a closed book. But Napoleon had the inscription copied and sent to the learned societies of Europe. The Greek, was of course, easy for the scholars to translate and the equivalents of such names as Alexander, Alexandria, and Ptolemy helped to solve the book-writing; but the hieroglyphics were baffling.
“The first man to grasp something of their meaning was that versatile genius Thomas Young, who guessed that Egyptian hieroglyphics were, like shorthand, based on a phonetic principle. He applied this idea and proved that the cartouche surrounding some of the hieroglyphics contained a royal name, which he successfully deciphered as Ptolemy. From this he proceeded to draw up a list of a number of Egyptian alphabetic characters, and on the whole his readings proved remarkably correct. His researches were published in 1819 and were afterwards followed up by the Frenchman Champollion, the greatest Coptic scholar of his time. This language, never entirely lost, enabled him to turn the book-writing on the stone to account, and in a few years he not only deciphered the names and titles but drew up classified lists of the hieroglyphics. To young and Champollion we owe all our deeper knowledge of the story of Egypt and of these monuments in the Museum that are part of it.”
Mary Fox-Davies writing in 1932 for her “Shown to the Children“ series tells us more about the British Museum. She says: “The British Museum is in the big district of Bloomsbury to the north of Holborn. This fine building is so large, and contains so much of interest, that if you went there every day for months there would still be much for you to see. The enormous collection of interesting and valuable treasures of all kinds has been increasing gradually, bit by bit, since the year 1700 when Sir John Cotton left to the nation his Cottonian Library.”
Sources/References & Related Websites:-
Fox-Davies, Mary, “The Shown To The Children” Series — London, T. C. & E. C. Jack Ltd., London, 1932.
Mee, Arthur, The King’s England — London — Heart of the Empire and Wonder of the World, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1949.
Norman, Bruce, Footsteps — Nine Archaeological Journeys Of Romance And Discovery, BBC Books, London, 1987.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rosetta-Stone
Copyright © Ray Spencer, The Journal of Antiquities, 2024.
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