Pictures of the Rosetta Stone

By N.S. Gill, About.com Guide

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a stela inscribed with a decree of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (13 years old at the time the decree was written) -- the fifth king of the Ptolemaic Dynasty that ended with the famous Cleopatra. The writing on the stone is in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs, repeating the same message so a variety of viewers could read it.

Pierre Francois-Xavier Bouchards, a member of Napoleon's army discovered it. It was later brought to England (in 1802).

The back of the basalt stone is less finished than the other surfaces. It is thought that the stone was propped against a wall. The text says the stela was to be put in a temple near the statue of Ptolemy.

The Egyptian hieroglyphic portion is thought to have originally contained 29 lines, but more than half of it has been lost. None of the inscriptions have word breaks which added to the difficulties in breaking the code. By the 4th century A.D., people no longer knew how to read hieroglyphs.

Source: Cracking codes: the Rosetta stone and decipherment By R. B. Parkinson, Whitfield Diffie, Mary Fischer, R. S. Simpson

Hieroglyphic Section of the Rosetta Stone | Demotic | Greek

Previous

• Hieroglyphic Section of the Rosetta Stone
• Demotic Section of the Rosetta Stone
• Greek Section of the Rosetta Stone

Next