Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of hieroglyphs
Piedra de Rosetta y desciframiento de los jeroglíficos
- Date
- 1799 / 1822 · confidence high
- Place
- Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt
- Credited to
- Pierre-François Bouchard (discovery, 1799); Jean-François Champollion (decipherment, 1822); Thomas Young
- People
- 👤 Jean-François Champollion1790–1832👤 Pierre-François Bouchard1771–1822👤 Thomas Young Davis1773–1829
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
French soldiers found a stele bearing the same decree in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. Champollion, using the royal cartouches and Coptic, showed in 1822 that hieroglyphs combined phonetic and ideographic signs, opening up three millennia of Egyptian texts.
Coordinates of Rashid, where the stone was found (today in the British Museum after its capture in 1801). Egypt claims its return.
What it led to
- Egyptology as a science
- Reading of Egyptian history through its own sources
- Model for the decipherment of other scripts (cuneiform, Maya)
Built on
- Egyptian Demotic scriptc. 650 BCE
- Napoleon's expedition to Egypt (1798) and the 'Description de l'Égypte'
- Studies by Kircher and Sacy
Made possible
- Decipherment of cuneiform (Behistun inscription)1802-1857
- Discovery of the Merneptah Stele1896
- Tomb of Tutankhamun4 de noviembre de 1922
- Egyptian philology
- Egyptian grammar and dictionary