052 Rosetta Stone

Museum Description: The Rosetta Stone

Room: 4/Case: None/Number: None

Scripture: Daniel 11:14

This is perhaps the most famous of all the artefacts in The British Museum.  The Rosetta Stone was discovered by Napoleon's men in 1799 in Rosetta, Egypt.  It was later captured by the British.  There is a story about Napoleon's troops being in a temple in Egypt and asking an old man living there what the shapes on the stones meant.  He told them it was the ancient Egyptian language, and he was the last man alive who could read it.  This may have been true, as it was not deciphered again until 1822.  French scholar Champollion noticed where a name appeared in the Demotic text in the middle and the Greek text at the bottom, there was an oval line around a group of characters in the hieroglyphic text at the top.  He guessed correctly that each of the symbols inside the line represented one syllable of the name.  That was the key to deciphering the whole language, though it took him another 23 years!  The text is a decree honouring Ptolemy V Epiphanes, dating from 196 B.C.E.  He was one of the kings of the south in Daniel's prophecy.