The "The Rosetta Stone - Need I Say More!" Story

 It was an ordinary day.  Reading pages of information dealing with the invention of printing.  If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you probably know by now that I taught Graphic Arts at Manheim Township High School which is located in the little town of Neffsville, Pennsylvania.  I retired from teaching in 1999 after close to 35 years of teaching printing.  But, I never gave up my love for the printed word and the history behind it.  I recently read a story about the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.  Ever hear about it?  The Rosetta Stone, as it came to be known, contained an ancient decree written in three types of scripts.  One of them was Egyptian hieroglyphics.  Using the Rosetta Stone and comparing the hieroglyphics to other writings, a French linguist was able to crack the hieroglyphic code.  For the very first time since hieroglyphics died out in the 4th century, scholars were able to decipher a lost language and the field of Egyptology was born.  In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte led a French campaign through Egypt and Syria.  He wanted to defend French trade interests and ultimately drive the British from India.  Scholars were invited along to document the antiquities they discovered.  While digging a foundation in Rosetta in July of 1799, a young officer named Pierre-Francois-Xavier Bouchard discovered a stone covered in inscriptions.  The broken stone piece was found to be part of a larger tablet and contained an official message or decree about King Ptolemy (204-181 BC).  The same message was written in hieroglyphics, Demotic and Ancient Greek.  But, Napoleon was eventually defeated and the Rosetta Stone fell into British hands.  The Treaty of Alexandria required that all antiquities gathered during Napoleon's campaign be turned over to the British.  The Rosetta Stone was one of those antiquities.  The stone was loaded onto a ship which eventually arrived in England in February of 1802.  It was then presented to King George III and later displayed at the British Museum.  Scholars immediately began to study the inscriptions.  One such scholar was Thomas Young who continued his study of the stone as did French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion.  Over the next two decades the race to decipher the Rosetta Stone continued.  Then in 1822, Champollion made the first of several breakthroughs and two years later he realized that hieroglyphics combined phonetic and ideographic signs.  Combined with his knowledge of the Coptic language, which is derived from ancient Egyptian, he cracked the code and was able to read the hieroglyphics.  Today he is known as the founder of the study of Egyptology.  The message on the stone was a decree celebrating the first anniversary of the coronation of King Ptolemy V.  Now scholars could decipher hieroglyphics on other Egyptian antiquities.  Today, the Rosetta Stone is still in the British Museum where it has drawn curious crowds for nearly 220 years.  

The Rosetta Stone

Another note of importance is that the first printing press, which was made by German printer Johannes Gutenberg, perished some time ago and only 48 original Gutenberg bibles have survived until today.  Bibles that change hands today do so for millions of dollars.  The British Museum's Gutenberg press is a great hulking wooden machine made by the Pratt Wagon Works in Utah.  The press design is based on a woodcut of a later press that historians deem to be very close to the original.  Printing is much older than Johannes Gutenberg.  An eighth-century block-printed scroll was printed three centuries before the Chinese first invented printing with movable ceramic type.  But, the museum's greatest focus is on the machinery used for printing.  Everything from the small hand-operated printing press to the Linotype machine can be found at the museum.  Then there is the invention of lithography that changed nineteenth-century newspapers when it gave them a chance to print pictures.  The British Museum features both process and content.  Benjamin Franklin's newspapers from Colonial times are featured as well as a room for making paper and another for setting type are featured.  

A closer view of the characters on the Rosetta Stone.

But, perhaps the Rosetta Stone is the #1 attraction at the British Museum.  If not...it certainly should be!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.