The Rosetta Stone Was Smashed, Stolen, Buried, And Somehow Survived

Ptolemy V Epiphanes came to the Egyptian throne at age five. He was 13 when, in 196 BCE, the Great Upper Egyptian Rebellion ravaged his lands. In response to unrest, his court issued a Decree of Memphis on March 27, which promised tax concessions, debt cancellations for temples, and amnesties for rebels in return for their loyalty. This was not benevolence. This was necessity.

To reach all levels of Egyptian society, scribes carved Ptolemy’s decree in three scripts: hieroglyphic (the language of the priests), demotic (the cursive script used in everyday paperwork), and ancient Greek (used by the royal court). Those three scripts represent only two languages: Egyptian and Greek. The Rosetta Stone was not even unique. At least two other copies of this same decree survive, including one at Philae.

Centuries later, in 391, the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I issued orders closing all non-Christian temples across the Roman Empire. The last-known hieroglyphic inscription was carved at Philae in 394. Once the temple schools were closed, the ability to read hieroglyphic and demotic writing died out within a generation. But the spoken language did not die out. Instead, it evolved into Coptic, which was written using Greek-based letters.

At some point in late antiquity, no longer protected as a sacred object, the stone was destroyed, perhaps during the dismantling of the entire temple enclosure. Almost two-thirds of the hieroglyphic portion at the top was broken off, with only 14 badly damaged lines surviving out of a total of about 30. The remnant, standing 112.3 cm high, lacks a rounded apex and one corner. Not a single soldier did it. Time did.

In about 1470, the Mamluk Sultan Al-Ashraf Qaitbay had a fortress, later named Fort Julien, constructed at the Nile Delta port of Rashid (known in Europe as Rosetta) to protect against possible sea-borne assault. Its builders used stone from ancient ruins in the vicinity, and the broken and inscribed stone was placed in the walls face down as rubble. It remained hidden for about 300 years.

In mid-July 1799, French engineer Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard was not digging for treasure but was supervising repairs to Fort Julien during Napoleon’s Egypt campaign when he came across a heavy, dark stone built face-down into an old wall. After cleaning it off, he noticed three bands of writing and notified his commanders.

Napoleon had brought along 167 “savants,” or civilian scholars, for his Egypt campaign. The stone reached them in August 1799 at their research center in Cairo, the Institut d’Égypte. It didn’t take long for a savant named Jean-Joseph Marcel to correctly identify the middle script as demotic. Prior guesses had been Syriac or Coptic.

Fearing that the stone might get lost in battle, savant Jean-Joseph Marcel and engineer Nicolas-Jacques Conté inked its carved face directly in January 1800 and used it as a printing block. They pulled paper impressions of the text and sent them to scholars all over Europe. If the stone itself were lost, at least the words would not be.

In 1801, the British and Ottoman armies defeated the French army in Egypt. The British, as part of the Capitulation of Alexandria, insisted that all antiquities found by the French were to be handed over. Naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire threatened to destroy the entire scientific collection rather than give it up. He did not follow through, but his bluff was sufficient for French scientists to retain their scientific papers and samples, while turning over the antiquities.

French General Jacques-François Menou tried to hide the 1,680-pound monolith away in his Alexandria house, underneath a carpet or inside his baggage. British diplomats discovered it there. Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner marched over to seize it and ordered troops to cart it off on an artillery gun-carriage.

From Alexandria, Colonel Turner transported the stone to England aboard HMS Égyptienne, a French frigate seized by the British. He arrived in Portsmouth in February 1802. The artifact wasn’t put on display right away. It sat with the Society of Antiquaries in London for several months while researchers began their initial analysis.

In late 1802, King George III gave it to the British Museum as a prize of war. Museum staff wrote in white letters around the edge: “CAPTURED IN EGYPT BY THE BRITISH ARMY IN 1801” on one side, and “PRESENTED BY KING GEORGE III” on the other. It’s still there today. None of it is ancient.

Earlier that same year, in July 1802, four plaster casts of the stone were dispatched from London to Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Trinity College Dublin, where scholars could pore over the inscription for themselves. Each cast was as faithful a reproduction as possible, right down to the smallest crack. A competition was about to begin.

In 1802, Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad began his study of the demotic section. He managed to isolate several Greek names spelled out phonetically, from which he constructed a partial demotic alphabet of 29 letters and was able to pick out a few Egyptian words such as “love” and “temple.” But his theory that all of Demotic was alphabetic proved false.

Between 1814 and 1819, the English scholar Thomas Young made paper copies of the stone and found that some hieroglyphs were inside oval rings called cartouches. These cartouches appeared to spell out the name Ptolemy using letters, meaning they contained royal names in phonetic form. But he still thought all hieroglyphs outside the cartouches were just pictures with no phonetic value.

The Rosetta Stone’s upper part was badly broken, and not enough hieroglyphs were left to provide a key by themselves. In 1815, the explorer William John Bankes discovered at Philae a bilingual obelisk inscribed with cartouches of both Ptolemy and Cleopatra, whose name never appears on the Rosetta Stone itself. After the obelisk was brought to England in the years 1819-21, comparison of its two inscriptions confirmed the phonetic alphabet.

On September 27, 1822, Jean-François Champollion, a 31-year-old French linguist, announced in Paris that hieroglyphs contained phonetic signs as well as signs that stood for pictures or meaning throughout the entire language. He had used Thomas Young’s idea about cartouches, along with his own knowledge of Coptic, a language that was descended from ancient Egyptian and was still spoken by the Christian Egyptians during church services. Family legends say that after making the announcement, he rushed home, cried out “Je tiens mon affaire!” (“I’ve got it!”) to his brother, and fell unconscious for five days. This story comes only from family memoirs, not from any contemporaneous account.

Guidebooks described the Rosetta Stone as being made of black basalt or black granite from 1802 until 1999. This was an illusion. In 1802, conservators at the British Museum coated the stone in wax to protect it from being touched by visitors. The wax combined with London smog and leftover printer’s ink to form a black crust. Geologists subsequently determined that the stone is actually a gray granodiorite, quarried near Aswan.

When German airships and planes began bombing London in World War I, the trustees at the British Museum in autumn 1917 moved the 1,680-pound rock about 50 feet below the ground into an unused part of the Postal Tube Railway near Holborn. It remained there for two years before going on public display in 1919.

In August 1939, a padded wooden box was used to smuggle the stone away prior to the outbreak of World War Two. British Museum employees carried it down 160 feet into London’s abandoned Aldwych Underground station, where it shared a hiding place with the Sutton Hoo finds, the treasures from an Anglo-Saxon ship burial. The stone re-emerged into the light of day in 1945, unharmed by the Blitz.

This content was created with the help of AI.