![]() The decree, as mentioned, is inscribed three times, perhaps to ensure as wide a readership as possible. Egyptian Monotheism? Akhenaten, the Heretic King.The Lost City of Thinis: Where is the First Capital of Ancient Egypt?.These dates are known to modern archaeology, placing the stone’s creation around 196 BC. Ptolemy V was inaugurated by the priests of Memphis on “Four Xandikos” and “Eighteen Mekhir”, dates from the Macedonian and Egyptian calendars. Helpfully, this dedication and the content of the stone even allows us to pinpoint the date of its creation. However it was reused as a foundation block for Fort Julien, a 15th century fortress near the town of Rosetta, and so the original context of the stone and its first purpose have been lost. The stone itself seems to have originally been part of the interior decorations of a temple. The Mysterious “Set”: An Ancient Egyptian Cryptid?.Egyptology and A Brief History of Egypt.A year later the stone was moved to the British Museum, where it remains to this day. His invasion of Egypt in 1799 resulted in French defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, supported by the British, in 1801. Napoleon however did not hold on to the stone for long. He focused on translating the Greek description to know the meaning of the stela’s text, and to understand the hieroglyphs. He predicted that a translation of a single text is represented through each script. Pierre François Xavier Bouchard, the French soldier who discovered the stone, had identified the importance of hieroglyphic scripts and the juxtaposed Greek. The site itself had been well known by that point, with officer Pierre François Xavier Bouchard uncovering the large inscribed stone fragment alongside the forces of Napoleon who were constructing fortifications. This city was situated near a tributary of the Nile, east of Alexandria, and the stone had been repurposed as building material. The stone was first discovered in July 1799 by French soldiers during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, in the city of Rosetta. That meant that the meaning of the hieroglyphs could be understood for the first time, and in translating them the entirety of the Egyptian language, and thousands of years of their history, was laid bare. Crucially, because these three texts all say the same thing, the Egyptian hieroglyphs could be compared to the other, known languages. The stone is inscribed with three different scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphic, Greek, and Demotic. This unassuming stone, a dark-colored granodiorite stela covered in carved text, single handedly opened the world of ancient Egypt to modern researchers. The Rosetta Stone is world famous and without a doubt one of the most important archaeological finds in history. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
Categories |