Rosetta Stone revisited

Cryptologia, Jan 2003 by Kruh, Louis

ROSETTA STONE REVISITED

Sole, Robert and Dominique Valbelle. The Rosetta Stone: The Story of the Decoding of Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Profile Books Ltd., 58A Hatton Garden, London EC1N 8LX UNITED KINGDOM. 2002.184 pp. L7.99, $12.60.

The intriguing history of the Rosetta Stone, from its discovery in July 1799, by a French officer in the small town of Rosetta, Egypt, its theft from the French by the British and its gift to the British Museum by His Gracious Majesty, King George III. The remarkable and competitive, intellectual adventure by some of the best minds of the time to decipher its mysterious inscriptions, is thrillingly told.

The three feet high, twenty-seven inches wide and six inches thick Rosetta Stone has three separate inscriptions: Fourteen lines of hieroglyphics, thirty-two lines of what was first considered Syrian and then Coptic but finally identified as Demotic, a script form of the ancient spoken Egyptian language, and fifty-four lines of Greek.

Thomas Young, a scholar and English physician and Johann David Akerblad, a Swedish diplomat, made valiant progress towards a solution, but the driven and formidable French orientalist, Jean-Frangoise Champollion, finally solved the mysterious inscriptions. After fourteen centuries the texts of ancient Egypt could be read again.