The Museums Sector of Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism & Antiquities celebrated the 223rd anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, an Ancient Egyptian artifact.
The Rosetta Stone was discovered by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard in July 1799 near the town of Rosetta in the Nile Delta. The stele composed of granodiorite is inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty.
Photos shared through Facebook include the oldest printed image of the Rosetta Stone in black ink on compressed paper. The inscription in the margin states in French that “the copy was printed from the stone itself in Cairo by Jean-Joseph Marcel, Director of l’Imprimerie Nationale and Galland Collector “4 Pluvoise, year 8 of the Republic.”
Marcel, who established Napoleon’s printing press l’Imprimerie Nationale in Cairo, was not only a printer and engineer but also a gifted linguist and is credited to be the first person to recognize that the middle text of the Rosetta Stone was in the ancient Demotic script which was seldom used for stone inscriptions. Along with French painter Nicolas-Jacques Conté, Marcel figured out a way to use the Stone as a printing block. Prints made from the Stone were circulated among European scholars who began deciphering the hieroglyphs.
A copy of the Rosetta Stone, captured by the renowned 19th-century British photographer John Jabez Edwin Mayall using the daguerreotype process, is displayed at the famous Metropolitan Museum of Art located in Manhattan, New York City. The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography with each daguerreotype a unique image on a silvered copper plate.
Since 1802, the original Rosetta Stone has been on public display at London’s British Museum, the world’s oldest national public museum. A replica of the same is displayed at the entrance of Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, the oldest archaeological museum in the Middle East.
The Rosetta Stone was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of hieroglyphic writing as it contains three translations of a single passage, two in Demotic and one in Ancient Greek. Scholars were able to use the Greek inscription to decipher the hieroglyphs.
