THE ROSETTA STONE
THE ROSETTA STONE
I could hardly imagine Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epifanes, king of Egypt from 204 to 181 BC., that a wake, crafted after the ceremony of its official coronation, would change the history of Egyptology by becoming the key to open to knowledge a completely indescipherable language.
The Rosetta stone is a granodiorite fragments used in 196 BC. to inform the people of the installation of the divine cult of Pharaoh. Given the heterogeneity of the Egyptian population of the time, in order to reach maximum spread, the text of the decree was inscribed in hieroglyphic, at the top of the stone; repeating it in demotic (abbreviated writing of the hieratic, which in turn it was hieroglyphic), in the middle zone; and in Greek, at the bottom. By essentially presenting the same content in the three inscriptions, he facilitated the key to the deciphering of hieroglyphic writing, a milestone completed by Jean-François Champollion on September 14, 1822.
On July 15, 1799, 221 years ago today, the soldier of the Napoleonic Hosts Pierre-François Bouchard found the stone in the vicinity of the town of Rashid (Rosetta), which after the French defeat to British hands, I travel from Alejandria to London where she has been exposed at the British Museum since 1802, where she and I are waiting for me because both she and I know that someday we will meet.
