Egypt - Rosetta Stone

A display of the Rosetta Stone in its protective case in the British Museum in London. On one side of the stone, some of the three types of writing are visible. The case and name plate are also visible, as are a falcon statue and other artifacts in the background. The Rosetta Stone was one of the most important discoveries in Egyptology. Originally a decree passed by priests to commemorate the first year of the coronation of Ptolemy V, the Rosetta Stone is inscribed with the proclamation in Greek, the language of administration; demotic, the everyday written form of the Egyptian language; and hieroglyphics, the pictographic writing of ancient Egypt. Before the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799, knowledge of how to interpret hieroglyphics had been lost. The stone allowed archeologists to compare hieroglyphics with Greek, giving them a basis to decipher the structure of the language, (1935).