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Here without the numbering: I’m Ilona Regulski, a curator in the department of Egypt and Sudan. Currently, I’m working on an exhibition titled “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt.” Welcome to my corner!

Next to me is obviously a replica of the Rosetta Stone. The real Rosetta Stone would be way too heavy to put on the table. It’s usually on display in gallery 4 in the sculpture gallery, but it is currently visible in the exhibition that I’m working on, “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt.”

You probably know that the Rosetta Stone helped us decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but “Rosetta Stone” is a modern name. The ancient Egyptians would not have called it this; they would probably have just called it a decree. We also don’t know where it was originally set up. So, even though the text tells us that it would have been set up in every important temple of Egypt, we don’t know where the Rosetta Stone itself was originally from. It’s named after the city where it was discovered in 1799 by soldiers of Napoleon’s army, and the French called present-day Rashid on the North coast of Egypt Rosetta or “Little Rose,” and that’s the name that was given to the stone upon discovery.

The decree was issued on the 27th of March 196 BC, during which time Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Basically, by successors of Alexander the Great who conquered Egypt in 332 BC. They were Greek-speaking Macedonians who ruled Egypt for almost 300 years until Egypt became part of the Roman Empire.

The Rosetta Stone is inscribed with a decree in three different scripts and two languages. At the top, we have Egyptian hieroglyphs, below that, we have Demotic, which is a cursive handwritten version of hieroglyphs, and below that, we have Greek. Both hieroglyphs and Demotic represent the ancient Egyptian language, and Greek represents the Greek language, which at the time of the Rosetta Stone’s discovery in 1799, was known to scholars. So they could use the Greek text to decipher hieroglyphs and Demotic and thereby unlock the ancient Egyptian language.

But what does the Rosetta Stone really say? It was a priestly decree that was drawn up on the 27th of March 196 BC and was issued by a council of priests who came to the city of Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt, on the occasion when the king, who at the time lived in Alexandria. During the Ptolemaic period, the capital was in Alexandria, but the Egyptian priests made a point of the fact that they wanted to meet in the ancient capital of Memphis, and that is explained to us in the introduction.

The main part of the text is about giving honors to the king. So the Egyptian priests list a number of honors that they want to give to the king, in a way to compare him with the gods. They’re giving him a lot of divine honors such as: his statue can be put up in the temple next to the statue of the gods, the statue can be carried around in a procession next to the statue of the gods, his birthday is celebrated in the temple, and the date of his session is added to dating formula in official documents; for example, the days of the New Year’s Festival are dedicated to him. And this is all formulated in one big sentence.

Why did the king deserve all these honors? Ptolemy V wanted to show that he was a very good king who did a lot of good deeds for the country. For example, he protected the country from invaders and local rebels, he guaranteed huge allowances to the temple, he gave gifts to the Cult of the Sacred Animals, which was still very important during the Ptolemaic period. He restored temples and created new ones. He also lowered taxes, which was very popular as you can imagine. And all of these good deeds led to the Priestly Council giving him all these honors, comparing him with the gods.

The decree would have been sent around the country, and the text tells us that it has to be written in stone in sacred writing - which is hieroglyphs, native writing - which is the Demotic; that we see in the middle, and the writing of the Greeks. And the stela would have to be put up in all important temples of Egypt so the text says the first class, second class, and third class status temples of Egypt. So if we believe the priests, we would have had hundreds of those copies of the Rosetta Stone distributed all over the country. And whether this happened or not, we’re not entirely sure, but we do have other copies of the Rosetta Stone. In fact, we have three almost exact copies that were found in Egypt, so two were found in the north of Egypt, and one was found in Elephantine, which is the southern border of Egypt, which does show us that the decree indeed was distributed across the country and was probably set up, carved in stone as the text asked, and set up in all the important temples of Egypt. These three decrees were very important because they are very close copies to the decree that we find on the Rosetta Stone, which also helps us to reconstruct the missing parts of the Rosetta Stone, to which I’ll come back later. But even the Memphis Decree, of which the Rosetta Stone was only one copy, was not an isolated text. We have more copies. So this type of decree, this type of honorary decree issued by priests for the Egyptian king, was used already in the time of Ptolemy III. The oldest version dates to 243 BC. It was also used by Ptolemy IV, and then also by Ptolemy V, who is mentioned in this text, and also by his successor Ptolemy VI. So we know that the decree was copied for about 150 years and potentially longer. Now all these copies are quite similar, but they differ a little bit in phraseology and we don’t find them anymore from 182 BC onwards, perhaps because by that time the kings were comfortable having their cults celebrated in the temple or the priestly class was already very well incorporated into the state, into the centralized administration, and maybe they didn’t feel the need anymore to issue such decrees. In total, we have 28 copies, and they’re still being discovered. The last one was discovered in 2011, and perhaps there are more copies of the Rosetta Stone out there.

As you can see, it’s missing some parts, so especially we’ve lost a bit of the sides but mainly the top is missing. We know, however, or at least we can reconstruct, how the stone may have looked like based on parallel texts based on the copies of the stone that I mentioned earlier. The closest parallel that we have comes from Naukratis which gives us the text only in hieroglyphs, strangely enough, but it is a very, very close translation of the Rosetta Stone. And this stela is completely preserved, and we also have the top. And the top, as we can see in the hieroglyph that indicates the stela in the text, was probably round, and the entire length of the stela would have been two meters. It’s very typical for an Egyptian stela to have some iconography at the top and so that would

The stela, written in hardstone in sacred, native, and Greek writing, would then have to be set up in all the temples of Egypt. All the temples of the first class, the second class, and the third class temples of Egypt. The sentence ends with the name of the king, which is Ptolemy V in this case, and his name is written in a cartouche, which is this long elongated oval, and the name reads “Ptolemy, who lives forever, beloved by Ptah.” His name appears a few times in the text, sometimes in slightly different spellings, but these royal names were used by early scholars to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. We don’t actually know what the first class, second class, and third class temples are. It is quite unusual for Egyptians to refer to their temples like this; I’ve never really seen this in any other texts. But we can assume, for example, that the Temple of Ptah in Memphis, where the decree was issued, and given that the Ptolemies are called or Ptolemy V likes to add to his name that he’s beloved of Ptah, that perhaps the Temple of Ptah was a first class temple and perhaps smaller provincial temples were third class temples, but we don’t really know. It’s really just a guess. Thank you for watching. If you want to know more about hieroglyphs or the decipherment of hieroglyphs, or the Rosetta Stone, you can come and see the exhibition “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt.” If you can’t make it to the show, you will be missing out, but the Rosetta Stone will be back in the permanent galleries, in Gallery 4, after the exhibition.