Original by Keri Murrell
The Rosetta Stone, once part of a bigger stone was discovered by Napoleon’s troops in Egypt in 1799, and was the key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian written language consisting of hieroglyphs – a script made of pictures representing words, The writing cut into the stone is in three different languages: hieroglyphs, Demotic (a common writing of Ancient Egypt), and Ancient Greek. It is an official statement in support of the ruler at the time – the Pharoah Ptolemy V. This enabled the scholars Thomas Young and then Jean-François Champollion, to translate and understand hieroglyphs. The stone has been housed in the British Museum since 1802 (BNSS has one of only a small number of plaster casts of the original).
