Translating Stones

A secular Icon of the art of translation is the Rosetta Stone. This trilingual stone became the translators’ key to decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Thomas Young, Jean-François Champollion and others.

According to the British Museum, the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests affirming the royal cult of the Egyptian 13-year-old king Ptolemy V.

The text is written three times: in Egyptian hieroglyphs (The formal writing system used generally in religious texts and not the only one), in demotic (used for ordinary purposes) and in Greek (The language of the government and administration).

In the fourth century, the hieroglyphs went out of use and the knowledge of how to read and write them got lost. Thomas Young, who was an English physicist, showed that some of the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone represented the sounds of the name of Ptolemy and them, the French scholar Jean-François Champollion realized the hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of the current knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.

One of the soldiers of Napoleon found the Rosetta Stone in 1799 while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile. In 1802, the British troops defeated the French in Egypt and the stone came into British possession under the Capitulation of Alexandria.

It has been on public display since 1802 at the Brittish Museum with only one break towards the end of the First World War when the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing .  They moved it to safety along with other 'important' objects. The Rosetta Stone spent the next two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below the ground at Holborn.