#Used rosetta stone french how to#
When it was discovered, nobody knew how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The importance of this to Egyptology is immense. You can make out the name Ptolemy as ΠΤΟΛΕΜΑΙΟΣ.
It features 14 lines of hieroglyphic script: Detail of the hieroglyphs, including a cartouche featuring the name Ptolemy (written right to left, along with an Egyptian honorific).ģ2 lines in Demotic: Detail of the Demotic section of the text.Īnd 53 lines of Ancient Greek: Detail of the Ancient Greek section. The Rosetta Stone was found broken and incomplete. The important thing for us is that the decree is inscribed three times, in hieroglyphs (suitable for a priestly decree), Demotic (the cursive Egyptian script used for daily purposes, meaning ‘language of the people’), and Ancient Greek (the language of the administration – the rulers of Egypt at this point were Greco-Macedonian after Alexander the Great’s conquest). The Rosetta Stone is one of these copies, so not particularly important in its own right. It says that the priests of a temple in Memphis (in Egypt) supported the king. The decree was copied on to large stone slabs called stelae, which were put in every temple in Egypt. The writing on the Stone is an official message, called a decree, about the king ( Ptolemy V, r. It was an important clue that helped experts learn to read Egyptian hieroglyphs (a writing system that used pictures as signs). It has a message carved into it, written in three types of writing. The Stone is a broken part of a bigger stone slab. But what is it? The Rosetta Stone and a reconstruction of how it would have originally looked. The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the British Museum.