Dr. Ilona Regulski

It's usually around, it's a circle that is elongated in order to put the name of the king in there.

So this is not just to contain the name of the king, but there's a huge symbolism behind this.

So the king's name is eternal, is forever and so on.

And this was a key thing for scholars to discover, that this oval contained the name of the king.

And within that, especially in the Ptolemaic period, because they're Greek, basically Greek Macedonian kings, they have foreign names.

Foreign names were always spelled phonetically.

So in a way, alphabetically.

So that means that one sign is one sound.

So in those cartouches, you have this alphabetic spelling in the Ptolemaic period, which led to the first breakthrough of being able to read phonetically the name of the king.

And then Champignon's discovery is that this actually also happened before and during the Pharaonic period, where you can have, again, this mix of signs in a cartouche.

Well, this is a bit the result of political history.

So at a certain point, the French army has to surrender to the combined forces, which is basically the British and the Egyptian army.

Egypt, of course, at the time, under Ottoman rule, had been for some time.

And the terms of surrender included stipulations about the objects that the French had collected during their time in Egypt.

And it was decided that 22 objects would be given to the British by the French.

And this was drawn up in Article 16 in the capitulation document, so the capitulation of Alexandria in 1801.

And this is a document that we also show in the exhibition.

It's kept in the National Archives and it was signed by the representatives of the three governments of the French, the British and the Egyptian government.

This is how the Rosetta Stone was part of these 22 objects and they were then transported to the UK, yeah, to England.

First they arrived in Portsmouth in 1802.