jan 1, 196 - Rosseta stone found by Pierre-François Bouchard

Description:

The Rosetta stone Is an ancient, egyptian granite slab bearing three paragraphs of text in three different languages. hieroglyphics, which were used mainly by priests, Demotic, a somewhat simpler script used for everyday purpose, and ancient Greek. It was found near the town of Rosetta (today’s Rashid) in 1799 by a Frenchman named Pierre francois bouchard. After the French surrender of Egypt in 1801, it passed into British hands and is now in the British Museum in London. The stone itself is said to have helped scholars (like us!) in understanding how to read hieroglyphics. The decipherment was largely the work of Thomas Young of England and Jean-François Champollion of France. Young discovered the way in which hieroglyphic signs were to be read. Champollion began publishing papers about the decipherment, and was the first Egyptologist to realize that some of the signs were alphabetic, some syllabic, and some determinative. It is said to have been carved in 196 bc, during the 9th year of the reign of ptolemy V epophanes in the ancient city of Memphis. It describes his acts of kindness.

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