The stone helps to decode the ancient Egyptian language

The Rosetta Stone is an invaluable archaeologist that holds the key to Egypt's 3,000-year-old door.

The Rosetta stone is a 114cm high, 72cm wide basalt, representing the two languages ​​of Egypt and ancient Greece. The reason the Rosetta stone represents two languages ​​derives from Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt in 332 BC, according to Discovering Ancient Egypt.

From this point, ancient Greek became the language of the ruling elite of Egypt. But the Greek ruling forces could not speak the language of the people and could not read the Egyptian hieroglyphs, causing resentment in public opinion.

The Rosetta stone is the key to the history of ancient Egypt.(Video: GreshamCollege).

The country of Egypt was in a state of uprising before the time of Pharaoh Ptolemy V came to power in 205 BC. In 196 BC, Ptolemy ordered the creation of the Rosetta stone in the political propaganda campaign to proclaim the fact that he claimed to be legitimate Egyptian pharaoh.

This birthplace turns the Rosetta stone into a key for modern people to enter the world of ancient Egypt with details of the 3,000-year history of the nation.

In 1799 the Rosetta stone was discovered by Pierre Bouchard , a French scholar and army officer while inspecting the construction of an ancient fortress near the city of Rosetta in the Nile Delta, during the Napoleon Wars. .

Bouchard immediately recognized the importance of this stone with French scholars brought to Egypt. In 1801, the French abandoned Egypt after defeating the British. Rosetta Stone changed hands and was displayed in the British Museum.

The importance of the Rosetta stone is not in the content of the political decree but in the text expressed in ancient Egyptian and Greek languages ​​according to the three writing systems: official hieroglyphic (hieroglyphic), Popular pictograms (demotic) and Greek letters for all people to read.

Thanks to the ancient Greek word not lost, the Greek inscription became the key to deciphering two ancient Egyptian inscriptions. The last sentence in the Greek version reads: "Written in sacred, indigenous and Greek characters". "Sacred" refers to official hieroglyphs, "indigenous " referring to popular pictograms.

Rosetta stone.

The first person to help decipher Rosetta stones is Thomas Young , a British physician and physicist. He started work in 1814.

On the hieroglyphic version, after correctly identifying the letters as the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy compared to the Greek version, he identified the characters representing the letters p, t, m, y and s. Through studying the orientation of Egyptian animal and bird characters, he found the reading of hieroglyphic letters .

Young made priceless findings but did not focus on decoding because he cherished too many projects. Thanks to Jean-Francois Champollion , the founder of the Egyptian branch, the hieroglyphic word was completely decoded.

As a historian and a linguist, Champollion had mastered Latin and Greek with six other ancient languages ​​in the East by the age of 16, including the word coptic, later developed Egyptian letters, using signs Greek characters combine demotic words to add sounds that are not in Greek characters.

Champollion inherited Young's ancient Egyptian linguistic heritage from 1821 and finally determined all the symbols of the Egyptian word with equivalent Greek letters. He was the first Egyptian learner to recognize beyond letters, and the ancient Egyptians also used symbols to express rhymes and in some cases limited words (such as this, others, all, . ).

He also found that the text using official hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone is a translation from the Greek text. This finding is in stark contrast to the previous view.

Young and Champollion's work provided the basis for modern people to translate entire texts using official Egyptian hieroglyphs. The life of the pharaohs and the ancient Egyptian civilians was also revealed through letters written on thousands of years of papyrus in the hot and humid climate of Egypt.