After the successful operations of Sir Ralph Abercromby in Egypt in the spring of 1801, a Treaty of Capitulation was drawn up, and by Article XVI the Rosetta Stone and several other large and important Egyptian antiquities were surrendered to General Hutchinson at the end of August in that year. Some of these he despatched at once to England in H.M.S. “Admiral,” and others in H.M.S. “Madras,” but the Rosetta Stone did not leave Egypt until later in the year. After the ink impressions had been taken from it, the Stone was transferred from Cairo to General Menou’s house in Alexandria, where it was kept covered with cloth and under a double matting. In September, 1801, Major-General Turner claimed the Stone by virtue of the Treaty mentioned above, but as it was generally regarded as the French General’s private property, the surrender of it was accompanied by some difficulty. In the following month Major-General Turner obtained possession of the Stone, and embarked with it on H.M.S. “L’Égyptienne,” and arrived at Portsmouth in February, 1802. On March 11 it was deposited at the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries of London, where it remained for a few months, and the writings upon it were submitted to a very careful examination by many Oriental and Greek scholars. In July the President of the Society caused four plaster casts of the Stone to be made for the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Dublin, and had good copies of the Greek text engraved, and despatched to all the great Universities, Libraries, Academies and Societies in Europe. Towards the close of the year the Stone was removed from the Rooms of the Society of Antiquaries to the British Museum, where it was mounted and at once exhibited to the general public.
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.
THE EARLIEST DECIPHERERS OF THE ROSETTA STONE.
The first translation of the Greek text was made by the Rev. Stephen Weston, and was read by him before the Society of Antiquaries of London in April, 1802. This was quickly followed by a French translation made by “citizen Du Theil,” who declared that the Stone was “a monument of the gratitude of some priests of Alexandria, or some neighbouring place, towards Ptolemy Epiphanes”; and a Latin translation by “citizen Ameilhon” appeared in Paris in the spring of 1803. The first studies of the Demotic text were those of Silvestre de Sacy and Åkerblad in 1802, and the latter succeeded in making out the general meaning of portions of the opening lines, and in identifying the equivalents of the names of Alexander, Alexandria, Ptolemy, Isis, etc. Both de Sacy and Åkerblad began their labours by attacking the Demotic equivalents of the cartouches, i.e. the ovals containing royal names in the hieroglyphic text. In 1818 Dr. Thomas Young compiled for the fourth volume of the “Encyclopædia Britannica” (published in 1819) the results of his studies of the texts on the Rosetta Stone, and among them was a list of several alphabetic Egyptian characters to which, in most cases, he had assigned correct values. He was the first to grasp the idea of a phonetic principle in the reading of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and he was the first to apply it to their decipherment. Warburton, de Guignes, Barthélemy and Zoëga all suspected the existence of alphabetic hieroglyphics, and the three last-named scholars believed that the oval, or cartouche
, contained a proper, or royal name. But it was Young who first proved both points, and successfully deciphered the name of Ptolemy on the Rosetta Stone, and that of Berenice on another monument. Another successful decipherer at this time was Mr. J. W. Bankes, who, in 1818, deciphered the name of Cleopatra on the granite obelisk that he had excavated at Philæ in 1815. In 1822 the list of alphabetic Egyptian characters that had been drawn up by Young was corrected and greatly enlarged by J. F. Champollion, who, between that date and the year of his death, correctly deciphered the hieroglyphic forms of the names and titles of most of the Roman Emperors, and drew up a classified list of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and formulated a system of grammar and general decipherment which is the foundation whereon all later Egyptologists have worked. The discovery of the correct alphabetic values of Egyptian signs was most useful for reading names, but for translating the Egyptian language a competent knowledge of Coptic was required. Now Coptic is only a name meaning “Egyptian.” The Egyptians who embraced Christianity after the preaching of Saint Mark at Alexandria are called “Copts,” and the translations of the Holy Scriptures, Liturgies, etc., which they made from Greek into their native Egyptian language soon after their conversion to Christianity, are said to be written in “Coptic.” The knowledge of Coptic has never been lost, and a comparatively large sacred literature has always been available in manuscripts for study by scholars. Champollion, whilst still a youth in the early years of the nineteenth century, realized the great importance of Coptic for the purpose of Egyptian decipherment, and he studied it to such good purpose that he became an authority on the language and literature of the Copts. In his studies of the inscription on the Rosetta Stone, his knowledge of Coptic enabled him to deduce the phonetic values of many syllabic signs, and to assign correct readings to many pictorial characters, the meanings of which were made known to him by the Greek text on the Stone.
METHOD OF DECIPHERMENT.
The method by which the greater part of the Egyptian alphabet was recovered is this: It was assumed correctly that the oval