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The Rosetta Stone refers to the crucial breakthrough
in the research regarding Egyptian hieroglyphs. It especially represents
the "translation" of "silent" symbols into a living language, which is
necessary in order to make the whole content of information of these symbols
accessible.
The Rosetta Stone is a compact basalt slab (114x72x28 cm) that was found
in July 1799 in the small Egyptian village Rosette (Raschid), which is
located in the western delta of the Nile. Today the stone is kept at the
British Museum in London. It contains three inscriptions that represent
a single text in three different variants of script, a decree of the priests
of Memphis in honour of Ptolemaios V. (196 b.c.).
The text appears in form of hieroglyphs (script of the official and religious
texts), of Demotic (everyday Egyptian script), and in Greek. The representation
of a single text of the three mentioned script variants enabled the French
scholar Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832) in 1822 to basically decipher
the hieroglyphs. Furthermore, with the aid of the Coptic language (language
of the Christian descendants of the ancient Egyptians), he succeeded to
realize the phonetic value of the hieroglyphs. This proved the fact that
hieroglyphs do not have only symbolic meaning, but that they also served as a "spoken language".
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