Dr. Ilona Regulski

And after some family members established the dynasty of the Ptolemies.

And so the Rosetta Stone dates to the reign of Ptolemy V. But we have an earlier version of the text from the reign of Ptolemy III.

Yeah, and at the time Egypt was very multicultural, it was really a melting pot of cultures and it was a trading hub in Northeast Africa.

And the main language that was used in the administration more and more was Greek during the Ptolemaic times, even though people were still speaking Egyptian at home.

So it was very bilingual as a society.

This is important because that's why, of course, the text was translated in these other languages.

So it was very international in a way.

in the temples definitely, but also in people's homes.

It takes some time for a language to be replaced by another language.

Even we have the same process later with when Egypt becomes part of the Arab world and starts to speak Arabic.

It takes time for people to use those languages at home, a few generations in fact.

So definitely in the second century BC, Egyptian was still very much part of the daily life in spoken language, but also in written culture.

So at the time we had Demotic, and Demotic was very much living next to Greek, and people were very fluent in moving between those two languages.

Sorry, yeah, that's the Egyptian language.

So the Egyptian language and the script, actually, we refer to as demotic.

It's a cursive, handwritten version of hieroglyphs, which is a later development of hieratic.

So from the very beginning, you had hieroglyphs and a handwritten script, very much like our typewriting font and a handwritten letter.

So you had those two scripts living next to each other, were used for very specific purposes.

And that develops into a very cursive writing that is called demotic by the Greeks when they come into Egypt.

And you may recognize the word demos in demotic.