Dr. Ilona Regulski

Thank you.

Yeah, it's definitely one of the most popular objects in the British Museum.

And yeah, we're very excited to be able to redisplay it in the exhibition and to tell stories about it that perhaps visitors are not so familiar with.

So it gives us an opportunity really to contextualize the stone, text on the stone, its journey to the British Museum.

And so it's really an opportunity to elaborate on all those stories.

Yes, and especially for those scholars who were working on hieroglyphs and trying to decipher hieroglyphs, they also used a lot of other objects in addition to the Rosetta Stone, and we're displaying a few of those.

The interesting part of that is also that these were objects that were

circulating in Europe, but also a lot of drawings, a lot of descriptions, because we also want to show that the available material was still limited, so we didn't really have big collections like the British Museum or the Louvre or the Museum in Turin.

All these big collections didn't exist as they exist today, so the evidence or the material that they had available was much less and was limited in fact.

Yeah, it's a stela, in fact, so a commemorative stone, if you want, that contains a text, a decree.

It's a priestly decree that was issued on the 27th of March, 196 BC.

You can know the exact date?

Conveniently for us.

And so that decree was issued probably on a piece of papyrus and then sent around the country.

And as the text tells us, it had to be inscribed on hard stone.

And in the three languages, the text actually tells us this, and then set up in all the important temples of Egypt.

So if that happens, we can't be sure that every temple had a copy of the Rosetta Stone, but we do have 28 copies in total.

So that decree was copied many times, and one of them came to Europe and led to the decipherment.

Yes, so Egypt at the time was ruled by the Ptolemies, the Ptolemaic dynasty, as we say.

They're basically successors of Alexander the Great, who conquered Egypt in 332 BC.