• Prominent Egyptian archaeologists have renewed a call for the return of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum to Egypt, 200 years after the deciphering of the slab unlocked the secrets of hieroglyphic script and marked the birth of Egyptology.

• The Rosetta Stone dates to 196 BC and was unearthed by Napoleon’s army in northern Egypt in 1799. It became British property after Napoleon’s defeat under the terms of the 1801 Treaty of Alexandria, along with other antiquities found by the French, and was shipped to Britain. 

• It has been housed at the British Museum since 1802.

• Bearing inscriptions of the same text in Hieroglyphs, Demotic and Ancient Greek, it was used by Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion to decipher Hieroglyphs from 1822, opening up understanding of ancient Egyptian language and culture.

• Egyptian archaeologists have called previously for its return, but are hoping that increasing moves by Western museums to return artefacts that were removed from countries under colonial rule will help their cause.

Rosetta Stone

• Rosetta Stone is perhaps the most famous piece of rock in the world. This fragment of an ancient stela (an inscribed slab) became the key that unlocked the mysterious hieroglyphic script of ancient Egypt. 

• The Stone is a broken part of a bigger stone slab. It has a message carved into it, written in three types of writing.

• The writing on the Stone is an official message, called a decree, about  King Ptolemy V (204–181 BC). The decree was copied on to large stone slabs called stelae, which were put in every temple in Egypt. 

• The decree is inscribed three times, in hieroglyphs (suitable for a priestly decree), Demotic (the cursive Egyptian script used for daily purposes, meaning “language of the people”), and Ancient Greek (the language of the administration – the rulers of Egypt).

• The rediscovery was made by French soldiers digging foundations for a fort in the town of Rashid (or Rosetta), a port city 65 km east of Alexandria. The soldiers – troops in Napolean’s Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801 – were preparing for the land Battle of Abukir in July 1799, between France and the Ottoman Empire. 

• The importance of this to Egyptology is immense. When it was discovered, nobody knew how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Because the inscriptions say the same thing in three different scripts, and scholars could still read Ancient Greek, the Rosetta Stone became a valuable key to deciphering the hieroglyphs.

• After the Stone was shipped to England in February 1802, it was presented to the British Museum by George III in July of that year.

Manorama Yearbook app is now available on Google Play Store and iOS App Store