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The Britannica Concise entry in Yahoo! Reference describes the Rosetta Stone as an "irregularly shaped block of black basalt." The inscription is fairly standard-issue stuff, recounting the words and accomplishments of the Greek ruler Ptolemy V, who ruled from 205-180 BC. Ptolemy assumed the crown at the tender age of 5 after a rather turbulent time in Egyptian history. The young ruler was faced with the daunting task of reclaiming lands lost to various invaders and reunifying his country's populace. As an attempt to reestablish legitimacy for the ruler and create a royal cult, Ptolemy's priests issued a series of decrees, sort of an ancient marketing campaign. The decrees were inscribed on stones and erected throughout Egypt. The Rosetta stone is a copy of the decree issued in the city of Memphis. The stone's importance, however, stems not from the message itself, but from the fact that the inscription was written in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic (or everyday) Egyptian, and Greek. Before the stone was discovered, efforts at translating hieroglyphics were patchy at best. Comparing the three scripts allowed the French scholar Jean
Francois Champollion to not only decipher the hieroglyphs, but to discover that they had a phonetic value. The stone was found in the small Egyptian city of Rashid by Napoleon's troops in 1799. It now resides in the British Museum. You can read an English translation of the text on this page.
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