Hi everyone.
I'm Ilona Regulski, I'm a curator in the department
of Egypt and Sudan.
I'm also currently working on an exhibition Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt.
Welcome to my corner!
Next to me is obviously a replica of the Rosetta Stone.
The real Rosetta Stone would be way too heavy to put on the table.
It's usually on display in gallery 4 in the sculpture Gallery but is currently visible
in the exhibition that I'm working on Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt.
You probably know that Rosetta Stone helped us to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs,
but the Rosetta Stone is a modern name.
The ancient Egyptians of course would not have called it like this.
They would probably have just called it a decree.
We also don't know where it originally was set up.
So even though the text tells us that it would have been set up in every important temple
of Egypt, we don't know where the Rosetta Stone itself was originally from.
It's named after the city where it was discovered in 1799 by soldiers of Napoleon's army, and
the French called present-day Rashid on the North coast of Egypt Rosetta or “Little
Rose” and that's the name that was given to the stone upon discovery.
The decree was issued on the 27th of March 196 BC and during this time Egypt was ruled
by the Ptolemaic Dynasty; basically by successors of Alexander the Great who conquered Egypt
in 332 BC, and they are Greek speaking Macedonians who come from basically from Greece and who
rule Egypt for almost 300 years until Egypt becomes part of the Roman Empire.
The Rosetta Stone is inscribed with a decree in three different scripts and two languages.
At the top we have Egyptian hieroglyphs, below
that we have Demotic which is a cursive handwritten
version of hieroglyphs and below that we have Greek.
And both hieroglyphs and demotic represent the ancient Egyptian language, and Greek obviously
represents a Greek language which at the time of discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799
was known to scholars so they could use the Greek text to decipher hieroglyphs and demotic
and thereby unlock the ancient Egyptian language.
But what does the Rosetta Stone really say?
It was a priestly decree that was drawn up on the 27th of March 196 BC and it was issued
by a council of priests who came to the city of Memphis; the ancient capital of Egypt;
on the occasion and the king who at the time lived in Alexandria.
During the Ptolemaic period the capital was in Alexandria but the Egyptian priests made
a point of the fact that they wanted to meet in the ancient capital of Memphis and that
is explained to us in the introduction.
But the main part of the text really is about giving honours to the king so the Egyptian
priests list a number of honours that they want to give to the king, in a way to compare
him with the gods.
So they're giving him a lot of divine honours such as: his statue can be put up in the temple
next to the statue of the gods, the statue can be carried around in a procession next
to the statue of the gods, his birthday is celebrated in the temple, and the date of
his session is added to dating formula in official documents; for example the days of
the New Year's Festival are dedicated to him.
And this is all formulated in one big sentence.
Why did the king deserve all these honours?
Ptolemy V obviously wanted to show that he was a very good king, he did a lot of good
deeds for the country.
So for example he protected the country from invaders, from local rebels, he guaranteed
huge allowances to the temple, he gave gifts to the to the Cult of the Sacred Animals which
was still very important during the Ptolemaic period.
He restored temples, he created new ones.
He also lowered taxes, which was very popular as you can imagine.
And all of these good deeds led to the Priestly Council giving him all these honours comparing
him with the gods and at the end of the text the last lines of every text has a prescription
about the publication of the text.
So the decree would have been sent around the country and the text tells us that it
has to be written in stone in sacred writing - which is hieroglyphs.
Native writing - which is the demotic; that we see in the middle.
And the writing of the Greeks.
And the stela would have to be put up in all important temples of Egypt so the text says
the first class second class and third class status temples of Egypt.
So if we believe the priests we would have had hundreds of those copies of the Rosetta
Stone distributed all over the country.
And whether this happened or not we're not entirely sure, but we do have other copies
of the Rosetta Stone.
In fact we have three almost exact copies that were found in Egypt, so two were found
in the north of Egypt and one was found in Elephantine which is the southern border of
Egypt which does show us that the decree indeed was distributed across the country and was
probably set up, carved in stone as the text asked ,and set up in all the important temples
of Egypt.
These three decrees were very important because they are very close copies to the decree that
we find on the Rosetta Stone which also helps us to reconstruct the missing parts of the
Rosetta Stone, to which I'll come back later.
But even the Memphis Decree, of which the Rosetta Stone was only one copy, was not an
isolated text.
We have more copies.
So this type of decree, this type of honorary decree issued by priests for the Egyptian
king was used already in the time of Ptolemy III.
The oldest version dates to 243 BC.
It was also used by Ptolemy IV, and then also by Ptolemy V who is mentioned in this text,
and also by his successor Ptolemy VI.
So we know that the decree was copied for about 150 years and potentially longer.
Now all these copies are quite similar, but they differ a little bit in phraseology and
we don't find them anymore from 182 BC onwards, perhaps because by that time the kings were
comfortable having their cults celebrated in the temple or the priestly class was already
very well incorporated into the state, into the centralized administration, and maybe
they didn't feel the need anymore to issue such decrees.
In total we have 28 copies, and they're still being discovered.
The last one was discovered in 2011, and perhaps there's more copies of the Rosetta Stone out
there.
As you can see it's missing some parts, so especially we've lost a bit of the sides but
mainly the top is missing.
We know however, or at least we can reconstruct, how the stone may have looked like based on
parallel texts based on the copies of the stone that I mentioned earlier.
The closest parallel that we have comes from Naukratis which gives us the text only in
hieroglyphs strangely enough, but it is a very, very close translation of the Rosetta
Stone.
And this stela is completely preserved, and we also have the top.
And the top, as we can see in the hieroglyph that indicates the stela in the text, was
probably round and the entire length of the of the stela would have been two meters.
It's very typical for an Egyptian stela to have some iconography at the top and so that
would also give it a very Egyptian look.
It would have been a series of kings or a series of gods.
We know from the stela from Naukratis that the stela itself was framed by a winged-sun
disk and underneath the king can be seen, also Ptolemy V, because it's an exact copy
of the Rosetta Stone and he's smiting or stabbing an enemy and this is probably an event that
is mentioned in the text actually.
It is the reconquering of the city of Lycopolis in the northern part of Egypt and Ptolemy
V reconquers the city and captures the enemies and that's probably what he is referring to
in this scene.
So it's because the same event is mentioned in the Rosetta Stone we can probably assumed
that there was also depicted at the top of the Rosetta Stone.
There has been a lot of research lately on the authorship of these texts and especially
of the translations.
So which of the text was first.
Was the Greek first?
Was the Egyptian first?
In the time the Rosetta Stone was inscribed Egypt was a very multicultural place, with
many foreigners and people who could speak more than one language.
For Egyptian priests and scribes who were working for the centralized administration
for the states, it probably wouldn't have been so difficult to compose the text in Greek
and then translate it into their own Egyptian native language.
In fact it would probably have been easier for them because they worked on a daily basis
in the Greek language.
They wrote Greek and they probably spoke Greek to each other at work even though they may
have been speaking their native language back home.
And I can relate to this a little bit because when I when I work, when I'm doing Egyptology,
when I'm working on an exhibition or on the Rosetta Stone it's much easier for me to do
this in English; to write in English, to communicate
with people in this language, rather than
in my own native language because of certain terminologies, because of certain words that
are very specific to the work that you're doing.
And this was the same for the priests in the second century BC.
They would have been much more familiar with the Greek terminology and the words that were
necessary to compose this decree.
So from that Greek text, the demotic text was translated and probably going back and
forth because there are certain words in the text for which no Greek equivalent would have
been possible or would have been available.
So certain names of equipment in the temples, certain shrines that I mentioned would not
have existed in Greek, so they would have taken this from the demotic script and language
which was the language that was spoken at the day - this was the day-to-day language
of Egypt at the time, and they would have translated this into Greek.
But some of these words for a native speaker of this dialect back in Greece would have
sounded very strange.
From that Greek and Demotic version then the hieroglyphic version would have been composed
which is an extra step which causes extra difficulties because hieroglyphs was not really
used anymore in daily life in the second century BC.
So at this point hieroglyphs was really restricted to temples.
The language that we find in hieroglyphs would have been a language that was suitable for
ritual purposes, for ceremonial events, but it wouldn't have lended itself very easily
to explain political events or to issue a decree like this.
And so it would not have been so easy to translate Demotic which rendered a day-to-day speech,
a contemporary language, in this ancient script.
But for the priests this was also a way to show their special status.
They were the ones who could still reach us ancient language that goes back thousands
of years to the time of the earliest pharaohs and by including the hieroglyphic scripts
they show so they want to show off basically.
They want to show that they are the only ones who I still have access to this ancient language
and thereby their status in society is confirmed.
And now I want to show you some details in the text
So the decree ends with a prescription on the publication of the decree, and it says
here that the decree should be written in hard stone.
The word for decree itself is missing partly, but we know this word from other parallel
texts.
And the word for stela is very nicely classified by what we call a determinative, which is
silent sign which we're not supposed to read but which indicates the kind of meaning of
the word.
And it actually is a sign that is in the form of the stela, and it indicates also that even
though the top part of the stela is missing, that it probably had a round top.
It also says it should be written in sacred writing, native writing and Greek writing.
The sacred writing is of course the hieroglyphs, and it's referred to as writing of the words
of the gods.
The native writing is the words of documents, it's shi-e, it's like documents/letters and
the word for writing is sekhau and the hieroglyph that you see is actually a scribal tool.
It's a palette that scribes would have used which contains a box to keep the pens, a little
bag to keep the pigments and then the palette on which they would mix their colours that
is the hieroglyph for the word writing that they use to indicate the two Egyptian scripts,
but when they refer to Greek writing they don't use the word sekhau they use the word
for letters.
And this is quite interesting because the Egyptians themselves obviously saw Greek writing
as something else, whereas hieroglyphs and demotic is not an alphabetic script , Greek
is an alphabetic script and that's why probably why they chose to use the word letters instead
of writing.
The Stela that was written in hardstone in sacred, native and Greek writing would then
have to be set up in all the temples of Egypt.
All the temples of the first class, the second class and the third class temples of Egypt
and the sentence ends with the name of the king which is Ptolemy V in this case and his
name is written in a cartouche which is this long elongated oval and the name reads Ptolmys
who lives forever beloved by Ptah.
And so his name appears a few times in the text sometimes in slightly different spellings
but these royal names were used by the early Scholars to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
We don't actually know what the first class, second class and third class temples are.
It is quite unusual for Egyptians to refer to their temples like this, I've never really
seen this in any other texts, but we can assume for example that the Temple of Ptah in Memphis,
where the decree was issued, and given that the Ptolemies are called or Ptolemy V likes
to add to his name that he's beloved of Ptah, that perhaps the Temple of Ptah was a first
class temple and perhaps smaller provincial temples were third class temples, but we don't
really know.
It's, it's really that's really a guess Thank you for watching.
If you want to know more about hieroglyphs or the decipherment of hieroglyphs, or the
Rosetta Stone you can come and see the exhibition Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt.
If you can't make it to the show, you will be missing out, but the Rosetta Stone will
be back in the permanent galleries, in Gallery 4, after the exhibition.