On This Day — 27 September
Posted on: Fri 27 Sep 2019
Breakfast celebrates the Western discovery of the world of Ancient Egypt.
On this day in 1822 the French scholar Jean Francois Champollion announced he had deciphered the Rosetta Stone.
The Rosetta Stone is a broken part of a bigger stone slab. The Stone has an Egyptian decree written in three different types of writing: Egyptian hieroglyphs (the language of the priests), demotic (the language of the Egyptian people) and Ancient Greek (the Greek were ruling Egypt by the time of the decree).
The French Army found the Stone in Egypt in 1799. The scholars at that time didn’t know how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs, but they could read Ancient Greek, which was the key to decipher the hieroglyphs.
The Rosetta Stone has been on display in the British Museum since 1802.
Produced by David Bucio
Image source: Chris 73 (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
