A decree of the priests gathered at Memphis in 196 BC, honouring a twelve-year-old king (196 BC)
The text establishes the royal cult of Ptolemy V and records gifts to the temples
General knowledge · Words & language
The Rosetta Stone
Inscribed 196 BC; found 1799
Writing and decipherment — the key to Egyptian hieroglyphs
A broken granodiorite stele carrying the same priestly decree in three scripts — Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic and Ancient Greek — issued at Memphis in 196 BC in the name of the boy-king Ptolemy V Epiphanes. Found by French soldiers at Fort Julien near Rashid in July 1799 and handed to the British in 1801, it gave scholars the parallel text that let Jean-François Champollion announce in 1822 that hieroglyphs could be read. It has been in the British Museum since 1802 and is that museum's most-visited single object; its name is now a byword for any key that unlocks a whole field of knowledge.
How to spot them
- ▸Three scripts, two languages: hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek versions of one decree
- ▸Dug up in 1799 during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and ceded to Britain in 1801
- ▸Champollion, Thomas Young, and the cartouche that spelled out a royal name
- ▸British Museum inventory number EA 24, the most-visited object in the building
Key facts
Spotted in July 1799 by Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard while strengthening Fort Julien (1799)
Near the Nile Delta town of Rashid, from which its usual English name comes
Handed to the British under the Capitulation of Alexandria, 1801 (1801)
It arrived in Portsmouth aboard the captured frigate HMS Égyptienne in February 1802
Champollion's announcement in Paris in 1822 that the picture-script could be read (1822)
Building on Thomas Young's work on the Demotic and on phonetic spellings of foreign names
Cleaned in 1999 to reveal dark grey rock with a pink vein, not the black basalt everyone assumed (1999)
White chalk in the letters and a coat of carnauba wax had disguised the granodiorite
Painted along its edges: 'Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801'
The other edge reads 'Presented by King George III'
Its name is now used for any essential clue that opens up a new field
Hence 'a Rosetta Stone for the genome' and similar phrases
Key ideas
- The decipherment worked because the Greek text was readable, the same decree appeared three times, and royal names enclosed in cartouches could be matched across the scripts.
Quick-fire facts
- •Granodiorite, not basalt — the dark appearance came from chalk and protective wax, removed in the 1999 cleaning
- •Found in July 1799 by Pierre-François Bouchard at Fort Julien near Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta
- •The decree is dated to 27 March 196 BC, the ninth year of Ptolemy V Epiphanes
- •The three scripts are hieroglyphic ('language of the gods'), Demotic ('language of documents') and Greek
- •Taken to London under the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801; on display at the British Museum since June 1802 as EA 24
- •Jean-François Champollion announced his transliteration of the Egyptian scripts in Paris in 1822
- •Thomas Young had earlier shown that the Demotic used phonetic characters to spell foreign names
- •Other copies of the same Memphis decree have since been found, including one on the Philae obelisk
- •Apart from wartime storage, it has left the museum only once — for a month at the Louvre in October 1972
- •It spent much of the First World War 15 metres underground in a Post Office tube railway station at Mount Pleasant
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- The British Museum — The Rosetta Stone (EA 24) Museum collection record for the stele
- Richard Parkinson — Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment