The mystery of the 800 kg Rosetta Stone that changed the history of ancient Egypt

On September 27, 1822, Champollion announced the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone, opening a great turning point for world archaeology.

In 1799, the Rosetta Stone was discovered by Pierre Bouchard, a French scholar and military officer, while inspecting the restoration of an ancient fortress near the city of Rosetta. At the same time, Napoleon's army attacked Egypt. Photo: Photos.com via Getty Images.

The Rosetta Stone is 112 cm high, weighs 760 kg and is engraved with three writing systems: hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. Photo: Claire Thorne.

Scholar Bouchard quickly recognized the importance of the Rosetta Stone and speculated that the text was identical despite being written in three scripts. This meant that ancient Greek could be used to decipher the other two scripts, which had been undecipherable for centuries. Photo: britishmuseum.

The Ottoman and British armies defeated the French forces. In 1801, the Rosetta Stone was taken by the British and transferred to the British Museum. Photo: history.com.

Based on the Greek inscription, scholars quickly deduced that the text engraved on the Rosetta Stone was a royal decree from 196 BC. Photo: historicaleve.com.

The decree was written in honor of Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes on the first anniversary of his accession to the throne. Its purpose was to assert the power of the Macedonian Greek pharaoh in a time of turmoil. Photo: historicaleve.com.

In 1814, the English physician and physicist Thomas Young claimed to have defined 218 demotic hieroglyphs and linked them to about 200 official hieroglyphs. Among them, he correctly identified the letters as the names of the pharaoh Ptolemy by comparing them with the Greek text. Photo: Meilan Solly / Photos © The Trustees of the British Museum, Wikimedia Commons under public domain.

Building on the work of his predecessors, French linguist Jean-François Champollion continued to decipher the Rosetta Stone. Eventually, he identified all the Egyptian symbols with their Greek equivalents. Photo: Arterra via Getty Images.

Accordingly, Mr. Champollion (pictured) became the first Egyptologist to realize that the ancient Egyptians not only used letters but also used symbols to represent syllables and in some cases, determinatives (such as this, that, every...). Photo: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Mr. Champollion also discovered that the official hieroglyphic text on the Rosetta Stone was a translation from a Greek text. Thanks to his achievements, experts and scientists later decoded many documents and records about ancient Egyptian civilization, from the lives of ordinary people to the royal family, mummification practices... Photo: londonchristiantours.com.

Readers are invited to watch the video : Egypt opens its ancient citadel to tourists. Source: THĐT1.

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