Today in History
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Today in History |
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July 15, 1799 |
In the summer of 1799, soldiers in Napoleon Bonaparte's army in the Nile Delta were demolishing a wall to increase the area of an existing fort. Clearing away debris and overgrowth, one of the soldiers spotted an unusual stone used in the wall's construction. On the slab was an inscription. As a team of scientists and historians examined the inscription, part of it was recognizable as Greek and part as Egyptian hieroglyphics. The third area was engraved in a demotic Egyptian, a written varient of the Egyptian language. The links to ancient Egypt's written and spoken languages had been long ago broken as they evolved from their original state to Coptic and then to Arabic. On the Rosetta Stone, it appeared the same text was repeated in three languages. Up to this time, the mystery of hieroglyphics remained unsolved and untranslatable. By translating the recognizable Greek, the other languages could not only be translated, but some rudimentary phonetics were derived. The now-famous Rosetta Stone provided the first solid translation of hieroglyphics ever accomplished and opened the door to scholarly translation of the ruins of the great Egyptian civilization.
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