Rosetta Stone
Topic: Bronze Age Civilisations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China · NCERT: Class 9, Ch 4 "Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation"
Meaning
The Rosetta Stone is a stone slab found in Egypt in 1799. It carries the same official order (a decree) written in three scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic (a later, everyday Egyptian script) and Greek. Scholars could already read Greek, so the stone worked as a key for reading Egyptian writing. Without it, much of Egypt's written past would have stayed closed to us.
Example
Pierre Bouchard, an engineer in the French army, found the stone while repairing a fort in Egypt in 1799. Jean-François Champollion compared the three texts and deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.
Don't confuse with
- Hammurabi's stele: this Babylonian stone slab shows King Hammurabi receiving laws from Shamash, the god of justice. Its law code is written in cuneiform. It is a law code, not a key for decoding a script.