When was rosetta stone founded

It was an important clue that helped experts learn to read Egyptian hieroglyphs a writing system that used pictures as signs. The writing on the Stone is an official message, called a decree, about the king Ptolemy V , r.

The decree was copied on to large stone slabs called stelae, which were put in every temple in Egypt. It says that the priests of a temple in Memphis in Egypt supported the king.

The Rosetta Stone is one of these copies, so not particularly important in its own right. Detail of the hieroglyphs, including a cartouche featuring the name Ptolemy written right to left, along with an Egyptian honorific. Detail of the Ancient Greek section. The importance of this to Egyptology is immense. When it was discovered, nobody knew how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Because the inscriptions say the same thing in three different scripts, and scholars could still read Ancient Greek, the Rosetta Stone became a valuable key to deciphering the hieroglyphs.

Napoleon Bonaparte campaigned in Egypt from to , with the intention of dominating the East Mediterranean and threatening the British hold on India. They discovered the Rosetta Stone on 15 July while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of Rashid Rosetta in the Nile Delta.

It had apparently been built into a very old wall. The city of Rosetta around the time the Rosetta Stone was found. Hand-coloured aquatint etching by Thomas Milton after Luigi Mayer , — The stone was shipped to England and arrived in Portsmouth in February Soon after the end of the 4th century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared.

In the early years of the 19th century, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young — , an English physicist, was one of the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. A letter from Thomas Young written on 10 February asking William Bankes to seek out these hieroglyphic examples whilst in Egypt. The meanings he suggests for these groups are mostly correct, but he was unable to analyse how the signs conveyed their meaning.

Still, the The action drove Egypt further toward an alliance with the Soviet Union and was a Born to slave parents in Missouri during the Civil War, Carver managed to get a high Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.

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It wasn't until the 19th century—two thousand years after its creation—that the Rosetta Stone helped scholars at long last crack the code of hieroglyphics. The artifact was originally displayed in a temple, possibly near the ancient town of Sais, then centuries later moved to Rosetta and used in the construction of Fort Julien, where it was eventually uncovered by the French.

The Rosetta Stone came into the possession of the British after they defeated the French in Egypt in Young surmised that the cartouches—hieroglyphs enclosed in ovals—contained the phonetic spellings of royal names, including Ptolemy, who was referenced in the Greek inscription. Ultimately, it was French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion who deciphered the Rosetta Stone and cracked the hieroglyphic code.