What is the Rosetta Stone?

Answer 1

It is a stone that was discovered in 1799, inscribed with three different scripts and two languages:

• Top - Egyptian Heiroglyphs
• Middle - Later Demotic - Heiratic writing
• Bottom - Greek

The Greek version juxtaposed on hitherto unreadable Egyptian scripts gave the key to translating Egyptian writing.

It was written in all three scripts so that the Egyptian priests, the native Egyptians, and the the Greeks and ruling Macedonian aristocracy could read what it said.

It contains 14 lines of hieroglyphs, 32 lines of demotic and 54 lines of Greek. The text is a decree from Ptolemy V describing the repealing of various taxes and instructions to erect statues in temples.

It was created in 196 BCE, discovered by the French in 1799 during Napoleon's takeover of Egypt at Rosetta, a harbour on the Mediterranean coast in Egypt, and contributed greatly to the decipherment of the principles of hieroglyphic writing in 1822 by the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, when he recognised that the third version was Greek, and started to work out the equivalence of the other scripts.

The Stone is 114.4 centimeters high at its tallest point, 72.3 centimeters wide and 27.9 centimeters thick, weighs about 760 kg. It was originally thought to be granite or basalt but is currently described as granodiorite and is dark grey-bluish-pinkish in color.

It has been on public display at The British Museum since 1802. In July 2003, Egypt demanded the return of the Rosetta Stone.

Answer 2

The Rosetta Stone is a stone slab inscribed with the text of a decree issued by King Ptolemy V in 196 BC. It's called the "Rosetta Stone" because it was (re)used as building material in a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta). It was rediscovered in the late 18th century and someone realized that the text on it was in multiple languages. Specifically, there was a section written in ancient Greek, which scholars could read to some degree, another section in what is now called "Demotic" script, a system for writing the language of Egypt at the time, and a third written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The discovery of a single document written in three languages allowed scholars to begin to decipher the two previously entirely opaque scripts.

Figuratively, it is used to mean anything that allows for translation or understanding.

Answer 3

A tool that helped decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs

APEX

Answer 4

the Rosetta mission is the mission that they take the Rosetta spacecraft to go study a comet