The Rosetta Stone Essay -- Hieroglyphs Egyptian Writing System Essays

The Rosetta St iodine In 1799, when Napoleons army was dismantling a groyne in Rashid, Egypt, they discovered the Rosetta Stone. fiddling did they know that this 11-inch thick piece of rock would be one of the superior discoveries in history It contained Egyptian scripture, with Greek also on the stone. This was utilise to decode the once lost Egyptian paper system. Before the 1800s, attempts at trying to uncover the secrets held by the antediluvian Egyptian hieroglyphics found on walls inside many tombs were useless. The pictures were falsely believed to be symbolic, representing some sort of target or idea. Something soon changed all of this misconception. 1799 was the year of a great discovery in Egyptology. French troops, under Napoleons 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 pen in 196 BC. The Rosetta Stone th en became instrumental in decrypting the long forgotten Egyptian writing system. The stone was first discovered near Rosetta, Egypt, by one of Napoleons 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 itinerary 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 right call in the demotic text, after comparing them with the same names found in the Greek text. (Ogg 78) Next on the scene was doubting Thomas boyish, 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 bei ng written with ovals around them, known as cartouches. In reality, the hieroglyphs only contained six. Of the phonetic value 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 oversight in which the birds and other animals were all facing. He also was able to justly identify some single-consonant... ...y death due to a stroke. The whereabouts of the Rosetta Stone directly 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 trifle 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. wise York Dover Publications Inc. , 1991. 2. Ogg, Oscar. The 26 Letters. modern York Thomas C. Crowell Company, 1962. 3. Claiborne, Robert. The Birth of Writing. sensitive 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 tier of Alphabets and Scripts. New York Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992.