The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele carved from dark grey granodiorite, a rock with a crystalline sparkle and a pink vein typical of a quarry at Gebel Tingar near Aswan. It was inscribed in 196 BC, during the Ptolemaic dynasty, with a decree issued on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The stone bears three inscriptions: the top register is in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (a deliberately archaic form of Middle Egyptian), the middle in the Egyptian Demotic script (closer to the spoken language of the time), and the bottom in Ancient Greek. The decree’s three versions differ only in minor ways, which made the stone the essential key for deciphering Egyptian scripts.

Originally displayed in a temple, possibly at Sais, the stone was later moved and eventually used as building material in Fort Julien near Rosetta (Rashid) in the Nile Delta. In July 1799, French army officer Pierre-François Bouchard discovered it there during France’s invasion of Egypt. It was the first bilingual Ancient Egyptian text recovered in modern times, sparking widespread public interest as a potential key to the untranslated hieroglyphs. Lithographic copies and plaster casts soon circulated among European museums and scholars. After the British defeated the French, the stone was taken to London under the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. Since 1802, it has been on almost continuous public display at the British Museum, where it is the most visited object.

The first complete translation of the Greek text was published in 1803, and study of the decree was already underway. In 1822, Jean-François Champollion announced the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts in Paris, though confident reading of Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature took longer. Key advances included recognizing in 1799 that the stone offered three versions of the same text; in 1802, that the Demotic used phonetic characters for foreign names; in 1814, that the hieroglyphic text did the same and shared similarities with the Demotic; and between 1822 and 1824, that phonetic characters also spelled native Egyptian words.

Later discoveries included three other fragmentary copies of the same decree and several similar bilingual or trilingual inscriptions, such as the Decree of Alexandria (243 BC), the Decree of Canopus (238 BC), and the Memphis decree of Ptolemy IV (c. 218 BC). Although the Rosetta Stone is now known not to be unique, it was the essential clue to modern understanding of ancient Egyptian literature and civilisation. The term “Rosetta Stone” is now used generally to mean the crucial key to a new field of knowledge.

The stone stands 112.3 cm high at its highest point, 75.7 cm wide, and 28.4 cm thick, weighing about 760 kilograms. Its front surface is polished with lightly incised inscriptions; the sides are smoothed, but the back is roughly worked, likely because it would not have been visible when the stele was erected. None of the three texts is complete. The hieroglyphic register has suffered the most damage: only the last 14 lines remain, all broken on the right and 12 also damaged on the left. The Demotic text survives best, with 32 lines, the first 14 slightly damaged on the right. The Greek text has 54 lines; the first 27 survive in full, while the rest are increasingly fragmentary due to a diagonal break at the bottom right.

After its arrival in London, the inscriptions were coloured with white chalk for legibility, and the surface was coated with carnauba wax to protect it from visitors’ fingers, giving the stone a dark colour that led to its mistaken identification as black basalt. These additions were removed during cleaning in 1999, revealing the original dark grey tint, the crystalline sparkle, and the pink vein. The stone was erected after the coronation of Ptolemy V, inscribed with a decree that established the divine cult of the new ruler, issued by a congress of priests at Memphis. The date is given as 4 Xandikos in the Macedonian calendar and 18 Mekhir in the Egyptian calendar, corresponding to 27 March 196 BC, the ninth year of Ptolemy V’s reign.