Rosetta Stone: The Decree of 196 BC That Unlocked Hieroglyphs

The Rosetta Stone is a broken slab of dark granodiorite inscribed with a decree issued by Egyptian priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 BC in honour of King Ptolemy V. The same text appears in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic script and ancient Greek. Found by French soldiers in 1799 and held in the British Museum since 1802, it provided the key that allowed Jean-François Champollion to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822, opening 3,000 years of Egyptian history to modern readers.

Background: Egypt under Ptolemy V

By the late 3rd century BC Egypt had been ruled for more than a century by the Ptolemies, a Macedonian Greek dynasty founded by Ptolemy I Soter. The court spoke Greek, while most Egyptians spoke Egyptian and the temples kept alive the ancient religion and its scripts.

The reign of Ptolemy IV, victor at the Battle of Raphia, ended in 204 BC amid crisis. His son Ptolemy V was a child of about five or six when he became king. Court factions fought over the regency, the Seleucid king Antiochus III seized Egypt’s possessions in the Levant, and a great revolt held much of Upper Egypt from 206 BC. In the Delta, rebels held the town of Lycopolis until royal forces besieged and took it.

In 196 BC Ptolemy V, then about 13 or 14, was formally crowned in Memphis according to Egyptian rites. A council of priests gathered for the occasion passed a decree that was copied on stone stelae and set up in temples across Egypt. The Rosetta Stone is one of these copies.

What the decree says

The decree follows a standard pattern for priestly synods of the Ptolemaic period. It opens with a long dating formula naming the king, his titles and the priests of the royal cult. It then lists the king’s good deeds, including:

• gifts of money and grain to the temples;
• cancellation of tax debts and reduction of taxes;
• an amnesty for prisoners and for those who had joined the rebellion and returned;
• the end of the obligation for priests to travel each year to Alexandria;
• the siege and capture of rebels in Lycopolis and the punishment of the leaders;
• care for the sacred animals, including the Apis and Mnevis bulls.

In return, the priests agreed to set up a statue of the king in every temple, to hold annual festivals on his birthday and accession day, and to inscribe the decree in “sacred, native and Greek characters” on a stele of hard stone in temples of the first, second and third rank. That instruction explains why the text appears in three scripts.

The decree shows the partnership between the Greek-speaking monarchy and the Egyptian priesthood. The king bought the priests’ support with privileges; the priests gave him religious legitimacy at a time when his authority was weak.

The stone itself

The surviving fragment measures about 112.3 by 75.7 by 28.4 centimetres and weighs about 760 kilograms. It was once part of a taller stele whose top, probably rounded and decorated with a winged sun disc, is lost.

The three texts are unequal in their survival:

Hieroglyphs were by then used mainly by priests for monumental and religious texts. Demotic was the cursive script of daily documents. The Greek text was the one scholars could read at once, and it became the starting point for decipherment.

The stele probably originally stood in a temple, possibly at Sais in the western Delta, and was later moved and reused as building material. Other copies of the same decree have since been found, including the Nubayrah stele and fragments from Elephantine, which help fill gaps in the damaged hieroglyphic section.

Discovery in 1799

In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt with an army and a large group of scholars, engineers and artists. In July 1799 French soldiers were rebuilding an old fort, later called Fort Julien, near the town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, on the western branch of the Nile. They found the inscribed stone built into a wall. The engineer officer Pierre-François Bouchard recognised that it might contain the same text in several scripts and reported it.

The stone was moved to the French institute in Cairo, and copies of the inscriptions were made by ink printing and casting, so scholars in Europe could study them. After the British and Ottoman forces defeated the French, the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801 required the French to hand over antiquities collected by the expedition. Despite protests from the French scholars, the Rosetta Stone was shipped to Britain, arriving in Portsmouth in February 1802, and was placed in the British Museum later that year. Painted inscriptions on its sides still record that it was “captured” by the British army and presented by King George III.

The race to decipherment

The Greek text was translated within months. The Demotic section came next: in 1802 the French orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad identified proper names in it, and Åkerblad worked out several Demotic letters.

The English polymath Thomas Young took up the problem from 1814. He recognised that Demotic and hieroglyphs were related, and argued that the oval rings called cartouches enclosed royal names. Using the name Ptolemy, he correctly identified the sound values of several hieroglyphs. Young, however, believed that phonetic signs were used only to write foreign names and that the system was otherwise symbolic.

Jean-François Champollion, a French scholar who had studied Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language written in Greek letters, made the decisive breakthrough. In September 1822, using the Ptolemy cartouche, the name Cleopatra from an obelisk found at Philae and cartouches of the pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose copied from older temples, he showed that hieroglyphs were used to write sounds in native Egyptian names as well as foreign ones. On 27 September 1822 he presented his results in a letter to Bon-Joseph Dacier of the French Académie des Inscriptions, known as the Lettre à M. Dacier.

A well-known family story, told later by his relatives, says that when Champollion grasped the solution he ran to his brother’s office in Paris, announced that he had found it, and collapsed from exhaustion for several days. Whatever the details, the letter of September 1822 is generally treated as the founding moment of Egyptology. Champollion went on to lead an expedition to Egypt in 1828–1829, where he was able to read inscriptions on the monuments themselves, but he died in 1832 at the age of 41 before completing his grammar and dictionary.

In his Précis du système hiéroglyphique (1824) Champollion explained that hieroglyphic writing mixes phonetic signs with signs that represent whole words and with determinatives, unspoken signs that indicate the category of a word. This remains the basis of modern Egyptology.

Myths and facts

The stone alone solved hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone was the starting point, but decipherment required many other inscriptions, a deep knowledge of Coptic and two decades of work by several scholars.

It contains a great literary or religious text. The content is an administrative decree, one of many similar priestly decisions. Its value lies in its three versions, not its subject.

Young versus Champollion. British and French writers long argued over who deserved credit. Most historians now accept that Young made important first steps, while Champollion understood the system as a whole.

The stone is black. For many years it was displayed with its inscriptions filled with white chalk and covered in wax and dirt. Cleaning in 1999 revealed the original dark grey granodiorite with a pink vein.

Legacy

The Rosetta Stone is the most visited object in the British Museum, and “Rosetta Stone” has become a general term for any key that unlocks a hidden code or field of knowledge. During the First World War it was moved for safety, along with other treasures, to a station of the Post Office railway in Holborn, London, in 1917. In 1972 it travelled to Paris for an exhibition marking 150 years since Champollion’s letter.

Egyptian officials, including former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass, have called for its return to Egypt, and the question of its ownership remains part of a wider debate about objects taken during colonial-era expeditions. Decipherment made it possible to read temples such as Abu Simbel, papyri and tombs, transforming knowledge of ancient Egypt.

Timeline

• 204 BC: Ptolemy V becomes king as a young child.
• 27 March 196 BC: Priests at Memphis issue the decree in honour of Ptolemy V.
• July 1799: French soldiers find the stone near Rashid (Rosetta).
• 1801: The stone passes to Britain under the Capitulation of Alexandria.
• 1802: It arrives in Britain and goes on display at the British Museum.
• 1814–1819: Thomas Young identifies the cartouche of Ptolemy and several sound values.
• 27 September 1822: Champollion presents his decipherment in the Lettre à M. Dacier.
• 1824: Champollion publishes the Précis du système hiéroglyphique.
• 1999: Conservation cleaning reveals the stone’s original colour.

Why it matters

Without the Rosetta Stone, the written record of ancient Egypt might have remained silent for much longer. Its three-script decree turned hieroglyphs from a mystery into a readable language, and in doing so founded the modern study of Egyptology.