The Rosetta Stone Essay -- Hieroglyphs Egyptian Writing System Essays

The Rosetta Stone In 1799, when Napoleons army was dismantling a wall in Rashid, Egypt, they discovered the Rosetta Stone. brusk did they know that this 11-inch thick piece of rock would be one of the greatest discoveries in history It contained Egyptian scripture, with Greek also on the stone. This was used to trace the once lost Egyptian committal to writing system. Before the 1800s, attempts at trying to uncover the secrets held by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics found on walls inside legion(predicate) tombs were useless. The pictures were falsely believed to be symbolic, representing some sort of object or idea. Something soon changed all of this misconception. 1799 was the year of a great breakthrough in Egyptology. French troops, downstairs Napoleons command, were destroying a wall when they found a black, basalt stone. The stone was inscribed with three different operates of writing Egyptian hieroglyphics, a shorthand form of hieroglyphs, and Greek written in 196 BC. The Rosetta Stone then became instrumental in decrypting the long forgotten Egyptian writing system. The stone was first discovered nearly 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 in that location was no way 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 appropriate names in the demotic text, after comparing them with the same names found in the Greek text. (Ogg 78) Next on the scene was Thomas Young, an side of meat 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 point have phonetic value, and were not made up of symbols. He then introduced t he idea of the proper names being written with ovals around them, known as cartouches. In reality, the hieroglyphs only contained six. Of the phonetic values 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 articulate by studying the direction in which the birds and other animals were all facing. He also was able to correctly identify some single-consonant... ...y death due to a stroke. The whereabouts of the Rosetta Stone today 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 make 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. N ew York Dover Publications Inc., 1991. 2. Ogg, Oscar. The 26 Letters. New York Thomas C. Crowell Company, 1962. 3. Claiborne, Robert. The Birth of Writing. New York Time Inc., 1974. 4. Andrews, Carol. The British Museum Book of The Rosetta Stone. New York cock 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 Story of Alphabets and Scripts. New York call forth N. Abrams, Inc., 1992.