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15th of July : anniversary of the Rosetta Stone's discovery

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The 15th of July is the anniversary of the rediscovery of the Rosetta Stone, whose inscriptions have been essential to improve the studies about ancient languages.

The Rosetta Stone is a stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion is Demotic script, and the lowest is Ancient Greek. Because it presents essentially the same text in all three scripts, it provided the key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

On the 15th of July, 1799, the French army was strengthening the defence of Fort Julien, a couple of miles north-east of the Egyptian port city of Rosetta (Modern day Rashid).
Here Lieutenant Bouchard spotted a slab with inscriptions on one side that the soldiers had uncovered; he saw at once that it might be important and informed general Menou, who happened to be at Rosetta. The find was announced to Napoleon's newly founded scientific association in Cairo, the Institut d'Égypte, noting that it contained three inscriptions, the first in hieroglyphs and the third in Greek, and rightly suggesting that the three inscriptions would be versions of the same text.
Napoleon himself inspected what had already begun to be called "la Pierre de Rosette", the Rosetta Stone, shortly before his return to France in August 1799.
At the end, French troops were defeated in the battle against British army and the antiquities found in Egypt were divided between the two. Great Britain, knowing the Stone as unique and aware of its value, claim for the Rosetta stone; it's not clear how the stone reached British hands.
During the course of 1802, plaster casts of the inscriptions were given to 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 to study these inscriptions.

Before the end of 1802, the stone was transferred to the British Museum, where it is located still today.

Photo by Hans Hillewaert.

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Category
Classical
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