The British Museum and The Rosetta Stone.

Just four years ago we visited this museum, as a Christmas present. Our few hours here was nowhere near enough to see even a small selection of the exhibits but for me this stood out the most as I was reading some Egyptian based novels at that time. It is the most famous object in the museum.

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous archaeological artifacts in the world. It is a granodiorite stone slab dating to 196 BC, created during the reign of King Ptolemy V of Egypt.
It is important because it was the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, a writing system that had been a mystery for nearly 1,400 years. Its discovery allowed scholars to finally understand ancient Egyptian language, history, and culture.
The same inscribed text appears on the stone in three different writing systems:
Hieroglyphs – used for religious and ceremonial texts
Demotic – the everyday script of ancient Egypt
Ancient Greek – the language of government under the Ptolemies
Because scholars already understood Greek, they could use it to decode the other two scripts.
Discovered in 1799 by French soldiers in Rosetta (Rashid), Egypt and found during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign
Jean-François Champollion, a French scholar, successfully deciphered the hieroglyphs in 1822. He proved that hieroglyphs were a combination of phonetic (sound-based) and symbolic signs
How it came to the British Museum : After the British defeated the French, the stone was acquired under the Treaty of Alexandria (1801). It has been part of the British Museum collection since 1802 and is one of the museum’s most visited and iconic objects.
Physical details: Height: 112 cm (3 ft 8 in) x 76 cm (2 ft 6 in), Weight: about 760 kg (1,680 lb). The artifact sits in a glass case, hence the light and reflection oddities.

Enjoy full screen.