Now the Rosetta Stone has fascinated me ever since I first came across it in a history lesson in junior school, and the rest as they will be a morning with its story today on Radio 4, with Melvyn Bragg on the In Our Time series.
The Rosetta Stone, 2007
“Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most famous museum objects in the world, shown in the image above in replica, and dating from around 196 BC.
It is a damaged, dark granite block on which you can faintly see three scripts engraved: Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle and Hieroglyphs at the top.
Napoleon’s soldiers found it in a Mamluk fort at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast, and soon realised the Greek words could be used to unlock the hieroglyphs.
It was another 20 years before Champollion deciphered them, becoming the first to understand the hieroglyphs since they fell out of use 1500 years before and so opening up the written culture of ancient Egypt to the modern age.
The Rosetta Stone on show, 1874
With Penelope Wilson, Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Durham University, Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, and Richard Bruce Parkinson, Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson”.*
Location; Egypt
Pictures; The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, 2007, © Hans Hillewaert, This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, and Experts inspecting the Rosetta Stone during the International Congress of Orientalists of 1874, British Museum, Illustrated London News
*The Rosetta Stone, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s2qd
No comments:
Post a Comment