When was rosetta stone deciphered

Arab scholars, beginning in the ninth century, CE, made unsuccessful attempts, as did Europeans in the fifteenth. Consequently, even though Egypt was littered with monumental stone inscriptions, no one could translate them.

The Rosetta Stone was immediately recognized as a tool that could be used to decode Egyptian hieroglyphic writing since it was inscribed with hieroglyphics, a second Egyptian script called demotic, and ancient Greek. If, as it was assumed, the three pieces of writing had the same text, the Greek could be used to understand the Egyptian.

The task would not be easy, however. Hieroglyphics combine a mixture of ideograms, or pictures representing concepts, and phonetic symbols represent sounds— and more than one symbol could be used to represent a sound.

Complicating matters, the demotic and Greek texts were not exactly the same. The answer is the hieroglyphs were used because the priests at that time still used it, while most of the public used the demotic language; therefore, writing on the stone was done in three languages so that the king and the common people could read it. How did Champollion decipher the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone? In the following lines ET reviews the details of the story. Comments 0.

How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. What Is Juneteenth? What is the Stone of Scone? Why Is a Marathon Why do people kiss the Blarney Stone? He immediately recognized the significance of the juxtaposed Greek and hieroglyphic scripts, predicting correctly that each script represented a translation of a single text. Since initially unearthed, the Rosetta Stone has become an international icon whose kaleidoscopic symbolism has been appropriated by diverse groups over the last two centuries.

Its current residence in the British Museum is a legacy of the imperial ambitions of France and England in their struggle to establish, maintain and extend colonial empires in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Repression of independent development by European powers led to mass protest, widespread resistance and periodic revolt, frequently mobilized around nationalist sentiments among the predominantly Islamic and Coptic populations.

The stone was officially turned over to the British in the Treaty of Alexandria in , then accessioned into the British Museum in There, under registration number BM EA 24, it has remained on almost continuous display. This historical context is crucial for understanding how various communities have shaped the meaning of the Rosetta Stone. For many groups of Egyptians, the stone has been regarded as an emblem of a shared cultural and national heritage.

The business community has eagerly capitalized on this popularity, best represented by the adoption of the moniker for a successful language-learning software. As scholars embarked on serious attempts to decode the Egyptian scripts with the help of the Greek translation, the trilingual nature of the inscription on the Rosetta Stone set off a decipherment frenzy in Europe.

Although popular imagination connects the Rosetta Stone most immediately to the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, the first significant steps toward decipherment focused on the demotic inscription since it was the best preserved of the Egyptian versions.