BRITISH MUSEUM, Rosetta Stone

Now I'd like to tell you about one of the most famous archaeological finds in the world, which is renowned because it made it possible to finally decipher hieroglyphics: the famous Rosetta Stone.

It is a black granite slab about a meter tall with an inscription divided into three columns: the first is in Egyptian hieroglyphic script, the second is in Egyptian "Demotic" script with different handwriting, and the third is in Greek.

The stele was discovered in 1799 by a captain from the Napoleonic army who had disembarked in Egypt, and was named after the city of Rosetta (now Rashid) located on the Nile Delta. The find immediately aroused great interest, as it was clear that the three different inscriptions were the same text. The text is a decree that was issued in 196 BC for the first anniversary of the coronation of the pharaoh Ptolemy V.

Two scholars immediately set out trying to decipher it: the English physicist Thomas Young identified the names of the sovereign and his consort in the three different inscriptions, but it was the French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion, who was a true linguistic genius, who managed to get to the bottom of the matter thanks to his knowledge of the Coptic language, which is a late form of the Egyptian language....