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109-765: Beheira Governorate enjoys an important strategical place, west of the Rosetta branch of the Nile . It comprises four important highways, namely the Cairo - Alexandria desert road, the Cairo agricultural road, the international road, and the circular road. Beheira Governorate is also home to a number of the most important Coptic monasteries in Wadi El Natrun (Scetes). Beheira consists of 13 centers and 14 cities, and contains important industries such as cotton, chemicals, carpets, electricity, and fishing. The governorate has

218-487: A gun-carriage . In a much more detailed account, Edward Daniel Clarke stated that a French "officer and member of the Institute" had taken him, his student John Cripps, and Hamilton secretly into the back streets behind Menou's residence and revealed the stone hidden under protective carpets among Menou's baggage. According to Clarke, their informant feared that the stone might be stolen if French soldiers saw it. Hutchinson

327-403: A supernova has been called a Rosetta Stone for understanding the origin of GRBs. The technique of Doppler echocardiography has been called a Rosetta Stone for clinicians trying to understand the complex process by which the left ventricle of the human heart can be filled during various forms of diastolic dysfunction . The European Space Agency 's Rosetta spacecraft, launched to study

436-547: A city on the Nile, close to the salt sea from a crater known as Ashtum ( Ancient Greek : Στόμα "mouth, estuary"). Also mentioned in the Al-Mushtaq excursion, it was described as a civilized city with a market, merchants and workers, and it has farms, yields, wheat and barley, and it has many good words, and it has many palm trees and wet fruits, and it has whales and fish species from the salty sea and many indigo fish. Despite

545-594: A contemporary catalogue of the artefacts discovered by the French expedition and surrendered to British troops in 1801. At some period after its arrival in London, the inscriptions were coloured in white chalk to make them more legible, and the remaining surface was covered with a layer of carnauba wax designed to protect it from visitors' fingers. This gave a dark colour to the stone that led to its mistaken identification as black basalt . These additions were removed when

654-413: A king was a feature of Greek cities. Rather than making his eulogy himself, the king had himself glorified and deified by his subjects or representative groups of his subjects. The decree records that Ptolemy V gave a gift of silver and grain to the temples . It also records that there was particularly high flooding of the Nile in the eighth year of his reign, and he had the excess waters dammed for

763-473: A more negative impact on Rashid, to the point that Abu al-Fidaa noted in the thirteenth century that the city was smaller than his mouth. Rashid contributed to the launching of the naval campaigns during Sultan Barbsay reign to invade the island of Cyprus and bring it under Egyptian control in 1426. Rashid also suffered from the attacks of the Christian knights who lived on the island of Rhodes during

872-573: A new literal translation of the Greek text for Champollion's use. Champollion in return promised an analysis of all the points at which the three texts seemed to differ. Following Champollion's sudden death in 1832, his draft of this analysis could not be found, and Letronne's work stalled. François Salvolini , Champollion's former student and assistant, died in 1838, and this analysis and other missing drafts were found among his papers. This discovery incidentally demonstrated that Salvolini's own publication on

981-467: A noteworthy number of archaeological sites, including at Abu El Matamir, Abu Hummus, Damanhour, Rosetta (Rashid), and Kafr El Dawwar. Coins, lamps, animal bones, and pottery from Roman and later Eastern Roman (Byzantine) eras are some of the archaeological finds discovered at Kom El Giza, and Kom El Hamam in Beheira. In 2017, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi appointed the first female governor in

1090-454: A scholarly work on ancient Egypt. Champollion saw copies of the brief hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions of the Philae obelisk in 1822, on which William John Bankes had tentatively noted the names " Ptolemaios " and " Kleopatra " in both languages. From this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters k l e o p a t r a (in today's transliteration q l i҆ w p 3 d r 3.t ). On

1199-499: A simple image of it was the museum's best selling postcard for several decades, and a wide variety of merchandise bearing the text from the Rosetta Stone (or replicating its distinctive shape) is sold in the museum shops. The Rosetta Stone was originally displayed at a slight angle from the horizontal, and rested within a metal cradle that was made for it, which involved shaving off very small portions of its sides to ensure that

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1308-558: A small but representative sample is recognised as the clue to understanding a larger whole. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the first figurative use of the term appeared in the 1902 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica relating to an entry on the chemical analysis of glucose . Another use of the phrase is found in H. G. Wells 's 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come , where

1417-697: A station of the Postal Tube Railway at Mount Pleasant near Holborn . Other than during wartime, the Rosetta Stone has left the British Museum only once: for one month in October 1972, to be displayed alongside Champollion's Lettre at the Louvre in Paris on the 150th anniversary of the letter's publication. Even when the Rosetta Stone was undergoing conservation measures in 1999, the work

1526-523: A suggestion made by Georg Zoëga in 1797 that the foreign names in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions might be written phonetically; he also recalled that as early as 1761, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy had suggested that the characters enclosed in cartouches in hieroglyphic inscriptions were proper names. Thus, when Thomas Young , foreign secretary of the Royal Society of London , wrote to him about

1635-407: Is credited as the first to recognise that the middle text was written in the Egyptian demotic script, rarely used for stone inscriptions and seldom seen by scholars at that time, rather than Syriac as had originally been thought. It was artist and inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté who found a way to use the stone itself as a printing block to reproduce the inscription. A slightly different method

1744-601: Is given as "4 Xandikos" in the Macedonian calendar and "18 Mekhir " in the Egyptian calendar , which corresponds to 27 March 196 BC . The year is stated as the ninth year of Ptolemy V's reign (equated with 197/196 BC), which is confirmed by naming four priests who officiated in that year: Aetos son of Aetos was priest of the divine cults of Alexander the Great and the five Ptolemies down to Ptolemy V himself;

1853-594: The Battle of Panium (198 BC) had resulted in the transfer of Coele-Syria , including Judaea , from the Ptolemies to the Seleucids . Meanwhile, in the south of Egypt, there was a long-standing revolt that had begun during the reign of Ptolemy IV, led by Horwennefer and by his successor Ankhwennefer . Both the war and the internal revolt were still ongoing when the young Ptolemy V was officially crowned at Memphis at

1962-523: The Brahmi script , thus unlocking ancient Indian epigraphy . The Behistun inscription has also been compared to the Rosetta stone, as it links the translations of three ancient Middle-Eastern languages: Old Persian , Elamite , and Akkadian . The term Rosetta stone has been also used idiomatically to denote the first crucial key in the process of decryption of encoded information, especially when

2071-571: The British Museum . According to Turner's narrative, he and Hobart agreed that the stone should be presented to scholars at the Society of Antiquaries of London , of which Turner was a member, before its final deposit in the museum. It was first seen and discussed there at a meeting on 11 March 1802. In 1802, the Society created four plaster casts of the inscriptions, which were given to

2180-544: The Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza in 2013. As John Ray has observed: "The day may come when the stone has spent longer in the British Museum than it ever did in Rosetta." National museums typically express strong opposition to the repatriation of objects of international cultural significance such as the Rosetta Stone. In response to repeated Greek requests for return of the Elgin Marbles from

2289-510: The Institut d'Égypte , in a report by Commission member Michel Ange Lancret noting that it contained three inscriptions, the first in hieroglyphs and the third in Greek, and rightly suggesting that the three inscriptions were versions of the same text. Lancret's report, dated 19 July 1799, was read to a meeting of the Institute soon after 25 July . Bouchard, meanwhile, transported the stone to Cairo for examination by scholars. The discovery

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2398-526: The King's Library of the British Museum, without a case and free to touch, as it would have appeared to early 19th-century visitors. The museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London towards the end of the First World War in 1917, and the Rosetta Stone was moved to safety, along with other portable objects of value. The stone spent the next two years 15 m (50 ft) below ground level in

2507-460: The Library of Alexandria . Clarke and Hamilton pleaded the French scholars' case to Hutchinson, who finally agreed that items such as natural history specimens would be considered the scholars' private property. Menou quickly claimed the stone, too, as his private property. Hutchinson was equally aware of the stone's unique value and rejected Menou's claim. Eventually an agreement was reached, and

2616-756: The Mamelukes , the city became an important commercial center, and remained so throughout Ottoman rule , until the eventual resurgence of the importance of Alexandria following the construction of the Mahmoudiyah canal in 1820. Rosetta witnessed the defeat of the British Fraser campaign , on 19 September 1807. The city is located 65 km (40 mi) east of Alexandria, in Egypt's Beheira governorate. Köppen-Geiger climate classification system classifies its climate as hot desert (BWh), but blowing winds from

2725-523: The Mediterranean Sea greatly moderate the temperatures, typical to the Egypt's north coast , making its summers moderately hot and humid, with winters that are mild and moderately wet when sleet and hail are also common. Rafah , Alexandria , Abu Qir , Rosetta, Baltim , Kafr el-Dawwar and Mersa Matruh are the wettest places in Egypt . The population of Rosetta has increased since

2834-491: The Memphis decree of Ptolemy IV , c. 218 BC. Though the Rosetta Stone is known to be no longer unique, it was the essential key to the modern understanding of ancient Egyptian literature and civilisation. The term "Rosetta Stone" is now used to refer to the essential clue to a new field of knowledge. The Rosetta Stone is listed as "a stone of black granodiorite , bearing three inscriptions ... found at Rosetta" in

2943-607: The Nile Delta . It was found there in July 1799 by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt . It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, and it aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher this previously untranslated hieroglyphic script. Lithographic copies and plaster casts soon began circulating among European museums and scholars. When

3052-597: The Nubayrah Stele , a stele found in Elephantine and Noub Taha, and an inscription found at the Temple of Philae (on the Philae obelisk ). Unlike the Rosetta Stone, the hieroglyphic texts of these inscriptions were relatively intact. The Rosetta Stone had been deciphered long before they were found, but later Egyptologists have used them to refine the reconstruction of the hieroglyphs that must have been used in

3161-784: The Parthenon and similar requests to other museums around the world, in 2002, over 30 of the world's leading museums—including the British Museum, the Louvre, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York City—issued a joint statement: Objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values reflective of that earlier era...museums serve not just

3270-644: The Philomathean Society at the University of Pennsylvania . Whether one of the three texts was the standard version, from which the other two were originally translated, is a question that has remained controversial. Letronne attempted to show in 1841 that the Greek version, the product of the Egyptian government under the Macedonian Ptolemies , was the original. Among recent authors, John Ray has stated that "the hieroglyphs were

3379-763: The Roemer-und-Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim , Germany; the Dendera Temple Zodiac in the Louvre in Paris; and the bust of Ankhhaf in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston . In August 2022, Zahi Hawass reiterated his previous demands. In 2005, the British Museum presented Egypt with a full-sized fibreglass colour-matched replica of the stele. This was initially displayed in the renovated Rashid National Museum , an Ottoman house in

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3488-497: The transliteration of the Egyptian scripts in Paris in 1822; it took longer still before scholars were able to read Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently. Major advances in the decoding were recognition that the stone offered three versions of the same text (1799); that the Demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names (1802); that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to

3597-511: The "language of the Greeks" as used by the Ptolemaic government. Securing the favour of the priesthood was essential for the Ptolemaic kings to retain effective rule over the populace. The High Priests of Memphis —where the king was crowned—were particularly important, as they were the highest religious authorities of the time and had influence throughout the kingdom. Given that the decree

3706-452: The "unscrupulous" Champollion plagiarised it. These articles were translated into French by Julius Klaproth and published in book form in 1827. Young's own 1823 publication reasserted the contribution that he had made. The early deaths of Young (1829) and Champollion (1832) did not put an end to these disputes. In his work on the stone in 1904 E. A. Wallis Budge gave special emphasis to Young's contribution compared with Champollion's. In

3815-452: The 16th century and Athanasius Kircher in the 17th. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided critical missing information, gradually revealed by a succession of scholars, that eventually allowed Jean-François Champollion to solve the puzzle that Kircher had called the riddle of the Sphinx . The Greek text on the Rosetta Stone provided the starting point. Ancient Greek

3924-624: The 1980s, as follows: Rosetta Stone The Rosetta Stone is a stele of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt , on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes . The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek . The decree has only minor differences across

4033-550: The 850s, the Abbasid caliph Al-Mutawakkil ordered a fort to be built on the site of the Ptolemaic city of Bolbitine , and the medieval city grew around this fort. Following the establishment of the Fatimid state in 969, and the establishment of the city of Cairo as the new capital of the country, foreign trade was active that was no longer limited to Alexandria only. Rather, Rashid and Damietta participated in it, especially in

4142-447: The British Museum since June 1802. During the middle of the 19th century, it was given the inventory number "EA 24", "EA" standing for "Egyptian Antiquities". It was part of a collection of ancient Egyptian monuments captured from the French expedition, including a sarcophagus of Nectanebo II (EA 10), the statue of a high priest of Amun (EA 81), and a large granite fist (EA 9). The objects were soon discovered to be too heavy for

4251-523: The British defeated the French, they took the stone to London under the terms of the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. Since 1802, it has been on public display at the British Museum almost continuously and it is the most visited object there. Study of the decree was already underway when the first complete translation of the Greek text was published in 1803. Jean-François Champollion announced

4360-509: The Demotic (1814); and that phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words (1822–1824). Three other fragmentary copies of the same decree were discovered later, and several similar Egyptian bilingual or trilingual inscriptions are now known, including three slightly earlier Ptolemaic decrees : the Decree of Alexandria in 243 BC, the Decree of Canopus in 238 BC, and

4469-559: The Egyptian and international media, asked that the stele be repatriated to Egypt, commenting that it was the "icon of our Egyptian identity". He repeated the proposal two years later in Paris, listing the stone as one of several key items belonging to Egypt's cultural heritage, a list which also included: the iconic bust of Nefertiti in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin ; a statue of the Great Pyramid architect Hemiunu in

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4578-482: The Egyptian port city of Rosetta (modern-day Rashid). Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard spotted a slab with inscriptions on one side that the soldiers had uncovered when demolishing a wall within the fort. He and d'Hautpoul saw at once that it might be important and informed General Jacques-François Menou , who happened to be at Rosetta. The find was announced to Napoleon's newly founded scientific association in Cairo,

4687-475: The French had not revealed. In a letter home, Clarke said that "we found much more in their possession than was represented or imagined". Hutchinson claimed that all materials were property of the British Crown , but French scholar Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire told Clarke and Hamilton that the French would rather burn all their discoveries than turn them over, referring ominously to the destruction of

4796-399: The Greek name " Ptolemaios ". He also noticed that these characters resembled the equivalent ones in the demotic script, and went on to note as many as 80 similarities between the hieroglyphic and demotic texts on the stone, an important discovery because the two scripts were previously thought to be entirely different from one another. This led him to deduce correctly that the demotic script

4905-424: The Greek names in the Demotic text. They could not, however, identify the remaining characters in the Demotic text, which, as is now known, included ideographic and other symbols alongside the phonetic ones. Silvestre de Sacy eventually gave up work on the stone, but he was to make another contribution. In 1811, prompted by discussions with a Chinese student about Chinese script , Silvestre de Sacy considered

5014-516: The Greek text at a Society of Antiquaries meeting in April 1802. Meanwhile, two of the lithographic copies made in Egypt had reached the Institut de France in Paris in 1801. There, librarian and antiquarian Gabriel de La Porte du Theil set to work on a translation of the Greek, but he was dispatched elsewhere on Napoleon's orders almost immediately, and he left his unfinished work in the hands of colleague Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon . Ameilhon produced

5123-541: The Nile. And from it to Cairo and the rest of the cities of Egypt, and this led to the flourishing of the commercial activity of Fuwwah , which affected the movement of trade Rashid, so that in the era of the Mamluks Fuwwah became the base of the trade networks in the region. During the Seventh Crusade , Louis IX of France briefly occupied the town in 1249. Following the destruction of Damietta during

5232-437: The Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs diverge, as Champollion drew on many other texts to develop an Ancient Egyptian grammar and a hieroglyphic dictionary which were published after his death in 1832. Work on the stone now focused on fuller understanding of the texts and their contexts by comparing the three versions with one another. In 1824 Classical scholar Antoine-Jean Letronne promised to prepare

5341-406: The Rosetta Stone of modern physics: once this pattern of lines had been deciphered much else could also be understood". Fully understanding the key set of genes to the human leucocyte antigen has been described as "the Rosetta Stone of immunology". The flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been called the "Rosetta Stone of flowering time". A gamma-ray burst (GRB) found in conjunction with

5450-420: The Rosetta site. Owing to its damaged state, none of the three texts is complete. The top register, composed of Egyptian hieroglyphs, suffered the most damage. Only the last 14 lines of the hieroglyphic text can be seen; all of them are broken on the right side, and 12 of them on the left. Below it, the middle register of demotic text has survived best; it has 32 lines, of which the first 14 are slightly damaged on

5559-488: The age of 12 (seven years after the start of his reign) and when, just over a year later, the Memphis decree was issued. Stelae of this kind, which were established on the initiative of the temples rather than that of the king, are unique to Ptolemaic Egypt. In the preceding Pharaonic period it would have been unheard of for anyone but the divine rulers themselves to make national decisions: by contrast, this way of honouring

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5668-473: The age of five after the sudden death of both of his parents, who were murdered in a conspiracy that involved Ptolemy IV's mistress Agathoclea , according to contemporary sources. The conspirators effectively ruled Egypt as Ptolemy V's guardians until a revolt broke out two years later under general Tlepolemus , when Agathoclea and her family were lynched by a mob in Alexandria. Tlepolemus, in turn,

5777-592: The agricultural area in Rashid is very limited, and the spread of sand formations to the west of the city and its urbanization has a greater impact on the city and its agriculture; As a result, Rashid was deserted several times by its residents and they took refuge in Fuwwah , in the south. What is now known today as Rosetta was an Umayyad stronghold in 749, when it was sacked during the Bashmuric Revolt . In

5886-456: The ancient Greek proverbial phrase Βολβίτινον ἅρμα , researchers believe that Bolbitine was celebrated for its manufactory of chariots in antiquity. The city was near the mouth of a branch of the Nile that was called the Bolbitine mouth (τὸ Βολβίτινον στόμα). Herodotus wrote that the Bolbitine mouth was not a natural but an excavated channel. Iban Haqal mentioned it and said that it is

5995-455: The artefacts, biological specimens, notes, plans, and drawings collected by the members of the commission. Menou refused to hand them over, claiming that they belonged to the institute. British General John Hely-Hutchinson refused to end the siege until Menou gave in. Scholars Edward Daniel Clarke and William Richard Hamilton , newly arrived from England, agreed to examine the collections in Alexandria and said they had found many artefacts that

6104-544: The basis of this and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters, completing his work on 14 September and announcing it publicly on 27 September in a lecture to the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres . On the same day he wrote the famous " Lettre à M. Dacier " to Bon-Joseph Dacier , secretary of the Académie, detailing his discovery. In

6213-610: The beginnings of the Fatimid state, which made urbanism restart. In the era of the Ayyubid state, neighboring Alexandria witnessed extensive commercial activity as a result of the concessions granted by the Ayyubids to Italian merchants, and before the Bay of Alexandria was re-cleared in 1013 in the Fatimid era by order of Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah , which contributed to linking Alexandria to the city of Fuwwah , south of Rashid and overlooking

6322-406: The benefit of the farmers. In return the priesthood pledged that the king's birthday and coronation days would be celebrated annually and that all the priests of Egypt would serve him alongside the other gods. The decree concludes with the instruction that a copy was to be placed in every temple, inscribed in the "language of the gods" (Egyptian hieroglyphs), the "language of documents" (Demotic), and

6431-514: The citizens of one nation but the people of every nation. Various ancient bilingual or even trilingual epigraphical documents have sometimes been described as "Rosetta stones", as they permitted the decipherment of ancient written scripts. For example, the bilingual Greek - Brahmi coins of the Greco-Bactrian king Agathocles have been described as "little Rosetta stones", allowing Christian Lassen 's initial progress towards deciphering

6540-524: The commission, marched north towards the Mediterranean coast to meet the enemy, transporting the stone along with many other antiquities. He was defeated in battle, and the remnant of his army retreated to Alexandria where they were surrounded and besieged , with the stone now inside the city. Menou surrendered on 30 August. After the surrender, a dispute arose over the fate of the French archaeological and scientific discoveries in Egypt, including

6649-404: The country's history, Nadia Ahmed Abdou , for Beheira Governorate. The rate of poverty in the governate is more than 60%, however, some social safety networks have been provided recently in the form of financial assistance, and job opportunities. The funding has been coordinated by Egypt's Ministry of Finance and with assistance from international organisations. The governorate is divided into

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6758-400: The cradle fitted securely. It originally had no protective covering, and it was found necessary by 1847 to place it in a protective frame, despite the presence of attendants to ensure that it was not touched by visitors. Since 2004 the conserved stone has been on display in a specially built case in the centre of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. A replica of the Rosetta Stone is now available in

6867-472: The crusade, Al-Zahir Baybars built it again in 1250. However, due to the huge costs of protecting it with strong walls and an impenetrable castle, he built a fortress in 1262 to monitor any possible upcoming invasion. During the reign of Al-Nasir Muhammad , the Gulf of Alexandria was re-excavated, so the commercial movement flourished more in Alexandria and was uttered so much that it became the mouth of Egypt's most important commercial city after Cairo. This had

6976-412: The decipherment story. Thomas Young's work is acknowledged in Champollion's 1822 Lettre à M. Dacier , but incompletely, according to early British critics: for example, James Browne , a sub-editor on the Encyclopædia Britannica (which had published Young's 1819 article), anonymously contributed a series of review articles to the Edinburgh Review in 1823, praising Young's work highly and alleging that

7085-432: The decree and the anniversary. It is uncertain why this discrepancy exists, but it is clear that the decree was issued in 196 BC and that it was designed to re-establish the rule of the Ptolemaic kings over Egypt. The decree was issued during a turbulent period in Egyptian history. Ptolemy V Epiphanes, the son of Ptolemy IV Philopator and his wife and sister Arsinoe, reigned from 204 to 181 BC. He had become ruler at

7194-422: The demotic register that the priests more commonly used in everyday life. The fact that the three versions cannot be matched word for word helps to explain why the decipherment has been more difficult than originally expected, especially for those original scholars who were expecting an exact bilingual key to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Even before the Salvolini affair, disputes over precedence and plagiarism punctuated

7303-428: The early 1970s, French visitors complained that the portrait of Champollion was smaller than one of Young on an adjacent information panel; English visitors complained that the opposite was true. The portraits were in fact the same size. Calls for the Rosetta Stone to be returned to Egypt were made in July 2003 by Zahi Hawass , then Secretary-General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities . These calls, expressed in

7412-729: The early lithographic prints of the Rosetta Stone, from Jean-Antoine Chaptal , French minister of the interior. He realised that the middle text was in this same script. He and Åkerblad set to work, both focusing on the middle text and assuming that the script was alphabetical. They attempted to identify the points where Greek names ought to occur within this unknown text, by comparing it with the Greek. In 1802, Silvestre de Sacy reported to Chaptal that he had successfully identified five names (" Alexandros ", " Alexandreia ", " Ptolemaios ", " Arsinoe ", and Ptolemy's title " Epiphanes "), while Åkerblad published an alphabet of 29 letters (more than half of which were correct) that he had identified from

7521-442: The first published translations of the Greek text in 1803, in both Latin and French to ensure that they would circulate widely. At Cambridge , Richard Porson worked on the missing lower right corner of the Greek text. He produced a skilful suggested reconstruction, which was soon being circulated by the Society of Antiquaries alongside its prints of the inscription. At almost the same moment, Christian Gottlob Heyne in Göttingen

7630-416: The floors of Montagu House (the original building of The British Museum), and they were transferred to a new extension that was added to the mansion. The Rosetta Stone was transferred to the sculpture gallery in 1834 shortly after Montagu House was demolished and replaced by the building that now houses the British Museum. According to the museum's records, the Rosetta Stone is its most-visited single object,

7739-402: The following municipal divisions for administrative purposes, with a total estimated population as of January 2024 of 6,992,742 . In some instances there is a markaz and a kism with the same name. According to population estimates, in 2024 the majority of residents in the governorate lived in rural areas, with an urbanization rate of only 19.5%. Out of an estimated 6,992,742 people residing in

7848-461: The general populace by way of the literate Egyptian priesthood. There can be no one definitive English translation of the decree, not only because modern understanding of the ancient languages continues to develop, but also because of the minor differences between the three original texts. Older translations by E. A. Wallis Budge (1904, 1913) and Edwyn R. Bevan (1927) are easily available but are now outdated, as can be seen by comparing them with

7957-507: The governorate council discussed a campaign of mosquito control and animal control to avert the spread of preventable diseases. Rosetta Rosetta ( / r oʊ ˈ z ɛ t ə / roh- ZET -ə ) or Rashid ( Arabic : رشيد , romanized :  Rašīd , IPA: [ɾɑˈʃiːd] ; Coptic : ϯⲣⲁϣⲓⲧ , romanized:  ti-Rashit ) is a port city of the Nile Delta , 65 km (40 mi) east of Alexandria , in Egypt 's Beheira governorate . The Rosetta Stone

8066-787: The governorate, 5,629,157 people lived in rural areas as opposed to only 1,363,585 in urban areas. According to the Egyptian Governing Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI), in affiliation with the Ministry of Investment (MOI), the following industrial zones are located in this governorate: In 1981, the Basic Village Service Program (BVS), under the auspices of USAID, had several water, road, and other projects, going on in several markazes in Beheira Governorate. In 2018

8175-465: The lost portions of the hieroglyphic text on the Rosetta Stone. French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, accompanied by a corps of 151 technical experts ( savants ), known as the Commission des Sciences et des Arts . On 15 July 1799, French soldiers under the command of Colonel d'Hautpoul were strengthening the defences of Fort Julien , a couple of miles north-east of

8284-487: The most important of the scripts on the stone: they were there for the gods to read, and the more learned of their priesthood". Philippe Derchain and Heinz Josef Thissen have argued that all three versions were composed simultaneously, while Stephen Quirke sees in the decree "an intricate coalescence of three vital textual traditions". Richard Parkinson points out that the hieroglyphic version strays from archaic formalism and occasionally lapses into language closer to that of

8393-548: The other three priests named in turn in the inscription are those who led the worship of Berenice Euergetis (wife of Ptolemy III ), Arsinoe Philadelphos (wife and sister of Ptolemy II ), and Arsinoe Philopator , mother of Ptolemy V. However, a second date is also given in the Greek and hieroglyphic texts, corresponding to 27 November 197 BC , the official anniversary of Ptolemy's coronation. The demotic text conflicts with this, listing consecutive days in March for

8502-547: The pink vein is typical of granodiorite from this region. The Rosetta Stone is 1,123 millimetres (3 ft 8 in) high at its highest point, 757 mm (2 ft 5.8 in) wide, and 284 mm (11 in) thick. It weighs approximately 760 kilograms (1,680 lb). It bears three inscriptions: the top register in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs , the second in the Egyptian Demotic script, and

8611-403: The postscript Champollion notes that similar phonetic characters seemed to occur in both Greek and Egyptian names, a hypothesis confirmed in 1823, when he identified the names of pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose written in cartouches at Abu Simbel . These far older hieroglyphic inscriptions had been copied by Bankes and sent to Champollion by Jean-Nicolas Huyot . From this point, the stories of

8720-423: The protagonist finds a manuscript written in shorthand that provides a key to understanding additional scattered material that is sketched out in both longhand and on typewriter . Since then, the term has been widely used in other contexts. For example, Nobel laureate Theodor W. Hänsch in a 1979 Scientific American article on spectroscopy wrote that "the spectrum of the hydrogen atoms has proven to be

8829-408: The recent translation by R. S. Simpson, which is based on the demotic text and can be found online, or with the modern translations of all three texts, with introduction and facsimile drawing, that were published by Quirke and Andrews in 1989. The stele was almost certainly not originally placed at Rashid (Rosetta) where it was found, but more likely came from a temple site farther inland, possibly

8938-536: The reign of the sultan Sayf ad-Din Jaqmaq . Sultan Jaqamq sent a large garrison to protect Rashid's beach. and ordered its reinforcement in the following years. Then the throne came to Qaitbay and renewed the Rashid Towers in 1479 and renewed the castle, which was named after him so far, and built a wall to protect the city from raids. Generally, Rashid had a defensive role with a little commercial role. Under

9047-443: The right side. The bottom register of Greek text contains 54 lines, of which the first 27 survive in full; the rest are increasingly fragmentary due to a diagonal break at the bottom right of the stone. The stele was erected after the coronation of King Ptolemy V and was inscribed with a decree that established the divine cult of the new ruler. The decree was issued by a congress of priests who gathered at Memphis . The date

9156-411: The royal town of Sais . The temple from which it originally came was probably closed around AD 392 when Roman emperor Theodosius I ordered the closing of all non-Christian temples of worship. The original stele broke at some point, its largest piece becoming what we now know as the Rosetta Stone. Ancient Egyptian temples were later used as quarries for new construction, and the Rosetta Stone probably

9265-421: The similarity of Rashid and Damietta in their geographical and administrative position throughout the ages and as an important coastal city, Rashid did not play a clear, influential role compared to Damietta's role in the beginnings of Arab Islamic rule, especially for Rashid's proximity to the location of Alexandria, which is the first coastal city in Egypt and primarily affected Rashid and its position. Likewise,

9374-469: The stone in 1814, Silvestre de Sacy suggested in reply that in attempting to read the hieroglyphic text, Young might look for cartouches that ought to contain Greek names and try to identify phonetic characters in them. Young did so, with two results that together paved the way for the final decipherment. In the hieroglyphic text, he discovered the phonetic characters " p t o l m e s " (in today's transliteration " p t w l m y s ") that were used to write

9483-460: The stone was cleaned in 1999, revealing the original dark grey tint of the rock, the sparkle of its crystalline structure, and a pink vein running across the top left corner. Comparisons with the Klemm collection of Egyptian rock samples showed a close resemblance to rock from a small granodiorite quarry at Gebel Tingar on the west bank of the Nile , west of Elephantine in the region of Aswan ;

9592-425: The stone, published in 1837, was plagiarism . Letronne was at last able to complete his commentary on the Greek text and his new French translation of it, which appeared in 1841. During the early 1850s, German Egyptologists Heinrich Brugsch and Max Uhlemann produced revised Latin translations based on the demotic and hieroglyphic texts. The first English translation followed in 1858, the work of three members of

9701-456: The third in Ancient Greek . These three scripts are not three different languages, as is commonly misunderstood. The front surface is polished and the inscriptions lightly incised on it; the sides of the stone are smoothed, but the back is only roughly worked, presumably because it would have not been visible when the stele was erected. The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele. No additional fragments were found in later searches of

9810-532: The three versions, making the Rosetta Stone key to deciphering the Egyptian scripts . The stone was carved during the Hellenistic period and is believed to have originally been displayed within a temple, possibly at Sais . It was probably moved in late antiquity or during the Mamluk period , and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid ( Rosetta ) in

9919-669: The town most likely comes from an Arabic name Rašīd (meaning "guide") and was transcribed and corrupted in numerous ways – the name Rexi was used by the Crusaders in Middle Ages and Rosetta or Rosette ("little rose" in Italian and French respectively) was used by the French at the time of Napoleon Bonaparte 's campaign in Egypt . The latter lent its name to the Rosetta Stone ( French : Pierre de Rosette ), which

10028-400: The town of Rashid (Rosetta), the closest city to the site where the stone was found. In November 2005, Hawass suggested a three-month loan of the Rosetta Stone, while reiterating the eventual goal of a permanent return. In December 2009, he proposed to drop his claim for the permanent return of the Rosetta Stone if the British Museum lent the stone to Egypt for three months for the opening of

10137-470: The transfer of the objects was incorporated into the Capitulation of Alexandria signed by representatives of the British , French , and Ottoman forces. It is not clear exactly how the stone was transferred into British hands, as contemporary accounts differ. Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner , who was to escort it to England, claimed later that he had personally seized it from Menou and carried it away on

10246-583: The universities of Oxford , Cambridge and Edinburgh and to Trinity College Dublin . Soon afterwards, prints of the inscriptions were made and circulated to European scholars. Before the end of 1802, the stone was transferred to the British Museum, where it is located today. New inscriptions painted in white on the left and right edges of the slab stated that it was "Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801" and "Presented by King George III". The stone has been exhibited almost continuously in

10355-474: Was adopted by Antoine Galland . The prints that resulted were taken to Paris by General Charles Dugua . Scholars in Europe were now able to see the inscriptions and attempt to read them. After Napoleon's departure, French troops held off British and Ottoman attacks for another 18 months. In March 1801, the British landed at Aboukir Bay . Menou was now in command of the French expedition. His troops, including

10464-595: Was believed to be authoritative, yet it was misleading in many ways, and this and other works were a lasting impediment to the understanding of Egyptian writing. Later attempts at decipherment were made by Arab historians in medieval Egypt during the 9th and 10th centuries. Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya were the first historians to study hieroglyphs, by comparing them to the contemporary Coptic language used by Coptic priests in their time. The study of hieroglyphs continued with fruitless attempts at decipherment by European scholars, notably Pierius Valerianus in

10573-587: Was converted to Christianity ; the last known inscription is dated to 24 August 394 , found at Philae and known as the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom . The last demotic text, also from Philae, was written in 452. Hieroglyphs retained their pictorial appearance, and classical authors emphasised this aspect, in sharp contrast to the Greek and Roman alphabets . In the 5th century , the priest Horapollo wrote Hieroglyphica , an explanation of almost 200 glyphs . His work

10682-475: Was discovered there in 1799. Founded around the 9th century on the site of the ancient town of Bolbitine , Rosetta boomed with the decline of Alexandria following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, only to wane in importance after Alexandria's revival. During the 19th century, it was a popular British tourist destination, known for its Ottoman mansions, citrus groves and relative cleanliness. The name of

10791-590: Was done in the gallery so that it could remain visible to the public. Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its eventual decipherment, the ancient Egyptian language and script had not been understood since shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire . The usage of the hieroglyphic script had become increasingly specialised even in the later Pharaonic period ; by the 4th century AD, few Egyptians were capable of reading them. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased as temple priesthoods died out and Egypt

10900-574: Was found by French soldiers at the nearby Fort Julien in 1799. Some scholars believe that there is no evidence that the city's name comes from Egyptian , and the Coptic form ϯⲣⲁϣⲓⲧ is just a late transcription of the Arabic name. Some argue that it could be derived from Ancient Egyptian : rꜣ-šdı͗ , lit.   'dug up mouth (of the Nile)'; and that the name is ancient. Because of

11009-517: Was informed at once and the stone was taken away—possibly by Turner and his gun-carriage. Turner brought the stone to England aboard the captured French frigate HMS Égyptienne , landing in Portsmouth in February 1802. His orders were to present it and the other antiquities to King George III . The King, represented by War Secretary Lord Hobart , directed that it should be placed in

11118-434: Was issued at Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt, rather than Alexandria, the centre of government of the ruling Ptolemies, it is evident that the young king was anxious to gain their active support. Thus, although the government of Egypt had been Greek-speaking ever since the conquests of Alexander the Great , the Memphis decree, like the three similar earlier decrees , included texts in Egyptian to show its connection to

11227-441: Was making a new Latin translation of the Greek text that was more reliable than Ameilhon's and was first published in 1803. It was reprinted by the Society of Antiquaries in a special issue of its journal Archaeologia in 1811, alongside Weston's previously unpublished English translation, Colonel Turner's narrative, and other documents. At the time of the stone's discovery, Swedish diplomat and scholar Johan David Åkerblad

11336-482: Was only partly phonetic, also consisting of ideographic characters derived from hieroglyphs. Young's new insights were prominent in the long article "Egypt" that he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1819. He could make no further progress, however. In 1814, Young first exchanged correspondence about the stone with Jean-François Champollion , a teacher at Grenoble who had produced

11445-610: Was re-used in this manner. Later it was incorporated in the foundations of a fortress constructed by the Mameluke Sultan Qaitbay ( c.  1416 /18–1496) to defend the Bolbitine branch of the Nile at Rashid. There it lay for at least another three centuries until its rediscovery. Three other inscriptions relevant to the same Memphis decree have been found since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone:

11554-473: Was replaced as guardian in 201 BC by Aristomenes of Alyzia , who was chief minister at the time of the Memphis decree. Political forces beyond the borders of Egypt exacerbated the internal problems of the Ptolemaic kingdom. Antiochus III the Great and Philip V of Macedon had made a pact to divide Egypt's overseas possessions. Philip had seized several islands and cities in Caria and Thrace , while

11663-513: Was reported in September in Courrier de l'Égypte , the official newspaper of the French expedition. The anonymous reporter expressed a hope that the stone might one day be the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. In 1800 three of the commission's technical experts devised ways to make copies of the texts on the stone. One of these experts was Jean-Joseph Marcel , a printer and gifted linguist, who

11772-528: Was widely known to scholars, but they were not familiar with details of its use in the Hellenistic period as a government language in Ptolemaic Egypt; large-scale discoveries of Greek papyri were a long way in the future. Thus, the earliest translations of the Greek text of the stone show the translators still struggling with the historical context and with administrative and religious jargon. Stephen Weston verbally presented an English translation of

11881-540: Was working on a little-known script of which some examples had recently been found in Egypt, which came to be known as Demotic . He called it "cursive Coptic" because he was convinced that it was used to record some form of the Coptic language (the direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian), although it had few similarities with the later Coptic script . French Orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy had been discussing this work with Åkerblad when, in 1801, he received one of

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