DESCRIPTION OF THE STONE.
The Rosetta Stone in its present state is an irregularly-shaped slab of compact black basalt, which measures about 3 feet 9 inches in length, 2 feet 4-1/2 inches in width, and 11 inches in thickness. The top right and left hand corners, and the right hand bottom corner, are wanting. It is not possible to say how much of the Stone is missing, but judging by the proportion which exists between the lengths of the inscriptions that are now upon it, we may assume that when it was complete it was at least 12 inches longer than it is now. The upper end of the Stone was probably rounded, and, if we may judge from the reliefs found on stelæ of this class of the Ptolemaïc Period, the front of the rounded part was sculptured with a figure of the Winged Disk of Horus of Edfû, having pendent uraei, one wearing the Crown of the South, and the other the Crown of the North. (See the Cast of the Decree of Canopus in Bay 28, No. 957.) Below the Winged Disk there may have been a relief, in which the king was seen standing, with his queen, in the presence of a series of gods, similar to that found on one of the copies mentioned below of the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. Whatever the sculptured decoration may have been, it is tolerably certain that, when the Stone was in a complete state, it must have been between five and six feet in height, and that when mounted upon a suitable plinth, and set up near the statue of the king in whose honour it was engraved, it formed a prominent monument in the temple in which it was set up.
The INSCRIPTION on the Rosetta Stone is written in two languages, that is to say, in EGYPTIAN and in GREEK. The EGYPTIAN portion of it is cut upon it in: I. the HIEROGLYPHIC CHARACTER, that is to say, in the old picture writing which was employed from the earliest dynasties in making copies of the Book of the Dead, and in nearly all state and ceremonial documents that were intended to be seen by the public; and II. the DEMOTIC CHARACTER, that is to say, the conventional, abbreviated and modified form of the HIERATIC character, or cursive form of hieroglyphic writing, which was in use in the Ptolemaïc Period. The GREEK portion of the inscription is cut in ordinary uncials. The hieroglyphic text consists of 14 lines only, and these correspond to the last 28 lines of the Greek text. The Demotic text consists of 32 lines, the first 14 being imperfect at the beginnings, and the Greek text consists of 54 lines, the last 26 being imperfect at the ends. A large portion of the missing lines of the hieroglyphic text can be restored from a stele discovered in 1898 at Damanhûr in the Delta (Hermopolis Parva), and now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (No. 5576), and from the copy of a text of the Decree cut on the walls of a temple at Philæ, and the correctness of the restorations of broken passages in the Demotic and Greek texts being evident, we are justified in assuming that we have the inscription of the Rosetta Stone complete both in Egyptian and Greek.