The Rosetta Stone

I have been looking into the dates that surround The Rosetta Stone to help with creating a timeline like we discussed so this is what I gathered so far.

　

The Rosetta Stone itself is a valuable key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs. The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests. It is one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation.The decree is inscribed on the stone three times in three different languages. First hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), second demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and third Greek (the language of the administration).Because the Rosetta Stone presents essentially the same text in all three scripts, it provided the key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

 

Soon after the end of the fourth century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them. Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.

　

Soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799 while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta). On Napoleon's defeat, the stone became the property of the　British under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria (1801) along with other antiquities that the French had found. The Rosetta Stone was transport to the British Museum and has been on exhibition since 1802, with only one break. Towards the end of the First World War, in 1917, when the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London. They moved it to safety along with other, portable, 'important' objects. The Rosetta Stone spent the next two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway, 50 feet below the ground at Holborn. Ever since its rediscovery, the stone has been the focus of nationalist rivalries. Including its transfer from French to British possession during the Napoleonic Wars. Also a long-running dispute over the relative value of Young's and Champollion's contributions to the decipherment, and since 2003, demands for the stone's return to Egypt.