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Chapter 1: What is the significance of the Rosetta Stone in history?
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You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to the Ancients. We have an episode from our archive today, one that was released originally almost four years ago.
We're talking about one of the most famous objects, artefacts ever discovered. One that was crucial in the race to decipher the ancient Egyptian script that is Hieroglyphs. This is the story of the Rosetta Stone.
Now, four years ago marks 200 years since the deciphering of pyroglyphs, and so the British Museum had an exhibition all about this seismic event, the unlocking of ancient Egypt to the world. So I headed over to the British Museum to interview their curator of the exhibition, Dr. Ilona Rogulski, all about Rosetta Stone and its story.
What this object is, how it was discovered, what is actually said on it, and why it plays such an important role in the race to decipher hieroglyphs 200 years ago.
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Chapter 2: How was the Rosetta Stone discovered and what was its initial impact?
Hope you enjoy the episode. Let's go. Ilona, it's wonderful to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you.
It's really lovely to be here at the British Museum to chat to you on the eve of this incredible new exhibition coming out on hieroglyphs. It seems to be at the heart of this new exhibition, the Rosetta Stone. This feels like one of the most famous objects in the entire world.
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.
And we're going to delve into all of that. It's also important to highlight straight away, we were chatting just before we started recording of these other objects, that the Rosetta Stone might be the most well-known object in this new exhibition, but there are so many other objects too, aren't there?
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
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Chapter 3: What does the Rosetta Stone actually say?
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.
And so before we go into that whole story, the journey and the deciphering story of the Rosetta Stone, I think background first of all. Most of us, if not everyone's heard the name Rosetta Stone, but what exactly is the Rosetta Stone?
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.
Well, let's delve into all of that now quickly. So you mentioned the date, so the early 2nd century BC.
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Chapter 4: What role did Dr. Ilona Regulski play in the exhibition about the Rosetta Stone?
So what's the context of ancient Egypt at this time? What is this period?
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. 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.
And so from what you're highlighting there, so Greek, the language of the administration, Egyptian elsewhere, but was the Egyptian hieroglyphic language, was it important in religious circles? You mentioned temples earlier. So does that Egyptian language still retain its importance in the religious sphere at that time then?
in the temples definitely, but also in people's homes.
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Chapter 5: What was the context of ancient Egypt during the time of the Rosetta Stone?
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.
Forgive my ignorance, what is Demotic?
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. So it's the language and the script of the people.
Absolutely right.
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Chapter 6: Who were the key figures involved in the decipherment of hieroglyphs?
I'd like to focus a bit on the material of the Rosetta Stone itself, the stone. What do we know about its material? Because it's quite striking when you see it today. Do we think it originates from somewhere like Rosetta? Or what's the backstory, do we think, to this particular stone?
Yes, so it's made of granodiorite, which is a very hard stone, and we don't exactly know where it comes from. It was probably quarried somewhere in the north of Egypt and then set up in one of the temples in the delta, probably. We don't know the exact find spot. Places like Sias in the delta have been mentioned in the past.
There have also been suggestions that maybe it comes from Heliopolis, which was a very important place to worship the sun god in ancient Egypt. We really don't know. We don't even know when it was transported to Rashid or Rosetta, as it was called by the French and Italians.
Probably during the Mamluk era, because it was very common, especially in the Mamluk era, to reuse stones, ancient Egyptian spolia, as we call it, in new buildings. So actually, the very early history of the Rosetta Stone is not very well known. Even though we have all this information historically on the stone, because of the text, we don't actually know where it was set up.
Chapter 7: What breakthroughs were made in understanding hieroglyphs through the Rosetta Stone?
And well, let's then focus on that text a bit more. You've kind of highlighted this already, but I want to go back to it just quickly. So an official document, three different languages, but what exactly is it talking about?
Yeah, so it's a priestly decree in which basically the king is given divine honors. It has a long list of these honors. For example, his statue has to be put up in the temple next to the statue of the god. The statue has to be carried around in processions next to the statue of the god. The priests have to honor the statue of the king and so on.
So it's really putting the king on the level of the gods, actually. Why does he deserve all these honors? Because he did a lot of good deeds for the country, obviously. He protected the country from invasion. invaders and rebels, he restored temples, he founded new ones, he lowered taxes, very popular. He guaranteed allowances for the animal cult and so on.
And because of all this, he should really be treated like a god.
Chapter 8: How did the decipherment of hieroglyphs change our understanding of ancient Egyptian culture?
The important thing about the content of this text is that this is not very Egyptian. So this is a kind of way of honoring a leader that was very popular or common from the 5th century onwards in the Hellenistic world, in Greece, but wouldn't have been common in Pharaonic, in earlier Pharaonic times, when the pharaoh was really an intermediary between the divine and the human world.
So he would not have to be considered a god by his subjects. he would already be very close to the gods. So we can be pretty sure that the text or the type of text was also imported to Egypt from Greece.
Right, that's so interesting because once again, the context of the Hellenistic world, this time that I found absolutely fascinating, the emergence of these divine ruler cults. But it's so interesting, you said, we have a place like ancient Egypt where the pharaoh was always seen as a god in their own right and the Ptolemies having to almost impose their own version of it.
on the people, on the priests, and a great example to see that. We think of the Rosetta Stone with the deciphering of hieroglyphs, which we'll get to. But it's also fascinating in, I'm presuming, in that development of divine ruler cult in Ptolemaic Egypt too.
Yes, it's a question why they felt they had to do that. It was probably just a practice that they were familiar with in their region, and they just brought it to Egypt. And this is a Yeah, a very good example of this assimilation between different cultures that is always happening when a foreign power comes into a new country.
And the Ptolemaic kings were very keen to be depicted as pharaohs and to continue that tradition of that powerful ruler. They just gave it a little bit of a local feel.
A bit of a local feel. And Rosetta, let's focus on Rosetta. I know that you went to modern Rashid, Rosetta, not too long ago. Whereabouts are we talking with Rosetta in Egypt today?
So as a place, it's located on the north coast of Egypt, a bit east of Alexandria. It didn't exist in Pharaonic times. It was founded actually much later, during the Greco-Roman period. Even its foundation is not very clear. Its exact moment of foundation, I mean. It was called Rosette by the French when they were there. And so when the stone was found, they called it the Pierre de Rosette.
So it became Rosetta Stone in English. It's present day Rashid. It's a very vibrant city with a diverse heritage. And we also like to show that in the exhibition. It's not just the place where the Rosetta Stone comes from.
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