The Rosetta Stone Documentary

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele engraved with a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC on part of King Ptolemy V. The decree shows up in three scripts: the upper message is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the mid section Demotic manuscript, and the lowest Ancient Greek. It provided the key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs since it offers essentially the very same text in all three manuscripts (with some small differences amongst them).
It is believed to have initially been displayed within a temple, perhaps at neighboring Sais, the stone was most likely moved during the early Christian or medieval period and was eventually made use of as structure material in the building of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. As the first Ancient Egyptian multilingual text recovered in modern times, the Rosetta Stone excited widespread public interest with its prospective to decipher this recently untranslated old language. British troops defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, and the initial stone came into British property under the Capitulation of Alexandria.
Study of the decree was already under means as the very first complete translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. It was 20 years, nevertheless, before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was revealed by Jean-François Champollion in Paris in 1822; it took longer still before scholars were able to check out Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently. Major breakthroughs in the decoding were acknowledgment that the stone supplied 3 variations of the exact same text (1799); that the demotic text utilized phonetic personalities to spell foreign names (1802); that the hieroglyphic message doinged this too, and had prevalent resemblances to the demotic (Thomas Young, 1814); and that, in addition to being utilized for foreign people, phonetic characters were additionally used to mean native Egyptian words (Champollion, 1822-- 1824).