The Rosetta Stone

In 1798, in the Egyptian settlement of Rashid (Rosetta), near Alexandria, a French soldier unearthed a large slab of black basalt on which was engraved an inscription in three scripts—Greek, demotic or New Egyptian, and hieroglyphics. The inscription was a decree honoring the good deeds of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes (203–181 B.C.). More importantly, it provided the long-sought key that enabled scholars to decipher the mysterious language of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.In the present volume, one of the 20th century's foremost Egyptologists tells the fascinating story of the Rosetta Stone—from its discovery during a French military excavation to its enshrinement in the British Museum as one of the great cornerstones of linguistic studies. In addition to an historical account of the Stone's discovery, its acquisition by the British, and the arrival of the Stone in London, Dr. Budge provides a concise and revealing history of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, full original texts and annotated English translations of the decree, and two appendixes containing translations of the stelae of San (Tanis) and Tall al-Maskutah.The heart of the book is a full and detailed description of the painstaking scholarship and inspired intuition that enabled a handful of scholars to crack the age-old code. Among the most important of these linguistic savants were Thomas Young, an English physician who first grasped the idea of a phonetic principle in reading Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Jean-François Champollion, the great French linguist who used Young's system of decipherment to produce a hieroglyphic alphabet that is the basis of the one used by Egyptologists today. Professor Budge shows how their ground-breaking contributions and the work of other linguists over the years eventually led to a true understanding of the once-inscrutible symbols. The implications of this breakthrough were vast. It opened a new and vitally important field of study to historians and linguistics experts, among whom were biblical scholars who could now find in previously untranslatable Egyptian texts substantiation of events related in the Bible.Enhanced with over 20 photographs, The Rosetta Stone is immensely erudite but unstuffy; replete with linguistic details but clear and accessible to the layman; in short, it is the definitive treatment of a richly engrossing linguistic detective story—one that will fascinate any student of Egyptology, languages, or the history of the ancient Near East.