About Rosetta Stone

RosettaNet took its name from the Rosetta stone , a dark grey-pinkish granite stone with writing on it in two languages, Egyptian and Greek, using three scripts, Hieroglyphic, Demotic Egyptian and Greek. The stone discovered in Egypt in 15 July 1799 is called such because it was discovered in a town called Rosetta (Rashid) by a soldier in napoleon's army, Captain Pierre-François Bouchard. The Stone is 114.4 cm high at its tallest point, 72.3 cm wide and 27.9 cm thick. The Rosetta stone is a text written by a group of priests in Egypt to honor the Egyptian pharaoh. It lists all of the things that the pharaoh has done that are good for the priests and the people of Egypt . Many people worked on deciphering hieroglyphs over several hundred years. However, the structure of the script was very difficult to work out. After many years of studying the Rosetta stone and other examples of ancient Egyptian writing, Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822. As, Champollion could read Greek, he was able to figure out what the seven demotic signs were. By looking at how these signs were used he was able to work out what they stood for. Then he began tracing the demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs. By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he could make educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs stood for. Today the Rosetta stone, currently located in the British museum, is frequently used as a metaphor to refer to anything that is a critical key to a process of decryption and translation.