The Rosetta Stone
In 1799, when Napoleon’s army was dismantling a wall in Rashid, Egypt, they discovered the Rosetta Stone. Little did they know that this 11-inch thick piece of rock would be one of the greatest discoveries in history! It contained Egyptian scripture, with Greek also on the stone. This was used to decode the once lost Egyptian writing system. Before the 1800’s, attempts at trying to uncover the secrets held by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics found on walls inside numerous tombs were useless. The pictures were falsely believed to be symbolic, representing some sort of object or idea. Something soon changed all of this misconception. 1799 was the year of a great breakthrough in Egyptology. French troops, under Napoleon’s command, were destroying a wall when they found a black, basalt stone. The stone was inscribed with three different forms of writing: Egyptian hieroglyphics, a shorthand form of hieroglyphs, and Greek written in 196 BC. The Rosetta Stone then became instrumental in decrypting the long forgotten Egyptian writing system. The stone was first discovered near Rosetta, Egypt, by one of Napoleon's soldiers, named variously as Bouchard, during his expedition to Egypt in August of 1799. In no time, this discovery was mentioned to all the top scholars who were immensely interested since there was no way to decode the hieroglyphs. In 1802, Johan David Akerblad was the first to break ground in identifying the first demotic symbols. He identified a few of the proper names in the demotic text, after comparing them with the same names found in the Greek text. (Ogg 78) Next on the scene was Thomas Young, an English physicist, who took an interest to the deciphering the Rosetta Stone as well. After much researching, Young was able to prove that the proper names in the hieroglyphics section of the stone did in fact have phonetic value, and were not made up of symbols. He then introduced the idea of the proper names being written with ovals around them, known as cartouches. In reality, the hieroglyphs only contained six. Of the phonetic values that he assigned to hieroglyphs, five were correct (p, t, i, n, and f). (Budge 54) In 1814, he revealed the way in which the hieroglyphic signs were to be read by studying the direction in which the birds and other animals were all facing. He also was able to correctly identify some single-consonant...
... middle of paper ...
...y death due to a stroke. The whereabouts of the Rosetta Stone today is the British Museum, in London. Without this old, black, basalt rock, we may never have deciphered the ancient egyptian scriptures. Still, there are many other writing systems of numerous lost civilizations that have yet to be deciphered. Until then, we can only make well thought inferences, and educated guesses until the next Rosetta Stone is unearthed.
Works Cited
1. Budge, Sir E.A. Wallis. Egyptian Language- Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphs. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1991.
2. Ogg, Oscar. The 26 Letters. New York: Thomas C. Crowell Company, 1962.
3. Claiborne, Robert. The Birth of Writing. New York: Time Inc., 1974.
4. Andrews, Carol. The British Museum Book of The Rosetta Stone. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1985.
5. Giblin, James Cross. The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone - Key to Ancient Egypt. New York: Harper & Row Publishers,1990.
6. Frimmer, Steven. The Stone That Spoke- and other clues to the decipherment of lost languages. Toronto, Canada: Longmans Canada Limited, 1969.
7. Jean, Georges. Writing- The Story of Alphabets and Scripts. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992.
It was underneath this fortification that numerous statues of Gudea were discovered, which make up the heart of the Babylonian collection at the Louvre Museum#. Overall the statues had been damaged, some decapitated and others broken in various ways, having been put into the foundation of the new fortification. Also in this section came a mixture of fragments of basic artifacts including various objects made from bronze and stone, of high artistic excellence. Some of these objects have been dated to the earliest Sumerian period enabling historians to trace Babylonian art and it’s history to a date some hundreds years prior. Excavations in the other mound resulted in the uncovering of the remains of various buildings.
Campbell, W. John. The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics. New York: Metro, 2000. Print.
The need for writing in Uruk was drastically different than that of the Egyptians, however. As evidenced at the archaeological site of Hierakonpolis, the Egyptian sy...
The Rosetta stone was discovered in 1799 that may mean that it has been lost for almost 1400 years.
The Rosetta Stone was found in a small delta village called Rashid which is known to Europeans as Rosetta. The stone is a black slab that is now called granodiorite. The stone is over a meter high, 28cm thick and weighs over three-quarters of a ton. On the face of the stone there are three scripts engraved onto it: Greek, demotic and hieroglyphs. Interestingly enough, upon translation the three scripts are found to say the same thing but with slight variations. Napoleon’s army originally found the stone but surrendered it to the British once being defeated at the Battle of the Nile by Admiral Nelson in 1801. The stone being taken during war does not give the British the right to keep it. The stone should be returned to Egypt due to simple ethical reasoning. If Britain were to hand the stone over to Egypt, this would not be the first time war spoils have been returned to their rightful owner. Agreements have been made
One could very well conclude that the Egyptians of the northern kingdom were critical thinkers in order to discover this intricate technique that forever left a lasting impact on mankind and his ability to pass on knowledge for future generations. We would later discover just how much the papyrus plant was important to later Egyptian creations during the unification, such as the creation of the Mdw-Ntr (Hieroglyphic) writing system—imagine having a writing system with nothing practical in everyday life to write on. Although stones were carved into, the papyrus plant would have made it easier for scribes to pass on more information at a time.
White, T. H.. The Sword in the Stone. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1958. Print.
What is the difference between a.. Setterquist, Jan. Ibsen and the Beginnings of Anglo-Irish Drama. New York: Gordian Press, 1974. 46 - 49, 58 - 59, 82 - 93, 154 - 166. 3. What is the difference between a'smart' and a'smart'? Shipley, Joseph T. The Crown Guide to the World's Great Plays.
Maspero, Gaston. Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt. 1895. Print.
Orly Goldwasser makes the claim that the alphabet was invented by Canaanites who were directly influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphics. He suggests that Egyptian hieroglyphics made it possible for the alphabet to be invented. She explains that the Canaanites likely used hieroglyphics as models and taking small sections of the pictograms and using them in a way to represent sounds. She clarifies that he thinks it’s likely that for some of the letters, they used objects from their own world as models instead of hieroglyphics. She further argues that these Canaanites were not sophisticated scribes, but rather were illiterate, based on his belief that they could not read hieroglyphics. She takes this position based on his observations of letters
6. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. [Toronto]: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
The mysteries of Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plains of England have perplexed human-kind since the beginning of recorded history. Some of the stones weighing as much as 40 tons were said to be transferred from Wales, which was a distance of about 137 miles. With the use of radiocarbon analysis at the site of Stonehenge it has been determined that the monument was built between 3000 and 1500 BC. The original purpose of Stonehenge has been lost in the pages of time, and therefore has been a major topic of discussion for archaeologists. Since the mid 12th century archaeologist, geologists, historians, and even some authors have put forth their own opinion of when and why Stonehenge was built. Throughout this essay I shall analyse and interpret different theories on Stonehenge in an attempt to understand what we know so far. It is in the mid 1100’s that we come across our first theory on Stonehenge, given by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
The first discovery was in the 1860’s by French Paleontologist, Eduard Lartet. The decorations were estimated back to the Stone Age because of the use of Ice Age animal bones. Researchers soon were digging everywhere in search of objects, ignoring cave drawings (Encarta, 1). In the 1880’s, a landowner discovered a cave in Spain filled with art and structural objects. Hiding it at first, researchers revealed it to the world that helped people learn to accept cave art for what it really was, an art. Many sites were uncovered shortly after, dating back to over 32,000 years (Versaware, 1).
During this period of Antiquity, the Egyptians had also constructed the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx. By no means was the pen as physically large and complex a creation as the wonders of the world, which were constructed with the sole purpose of being the final resting-place of the Pharaoh. However, the reed pen had a much more profound, a much greater effect on the world and the path our present-day history took. There are no records to indicate any one person or group as the inventors of the pen.