In 1822 on this day, French linguist / soldier Jean-François Champollion announced that he had deciphered the Rosetta Stone, which had three different languages, hieroglyphics, demotic and Ancient Greek, that enabled translation of ancient Egyptian texts. Comparing the three translations facilitated the interpretation of ancient Egyptians hieroglyphics. As the late Joan Acocella put it in the New Yorker:
"It was a slab of granodiorite (a cousin of granite), about four feet tall, two and a half feet wide, and a foot thick, inscribed on its front with three separate texts. The topmost text, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, was fourteen lines long. (It was probably about twice that length originally; the top of the slab had broken off.) The middle section, thirty-two lines long, was in some other script, which nobody recognized. (Called Demotic, it turned out to be a sort of shorthand derived, ultimately, from hieroglyphs.) But—eureka!—the bottom section, fifty-three lines long, was in Ancient Greek, a language that plenty of Napoleon’s savants had learned in school. One can only imagine what these men felt when they saw the third inscription, like a familiar face in a room full of strangers."
(photo: British Museum)
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