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WonderHistory fact

The Rosetta Stone is a broken slab carved with a decree issued in 196 BC by a council of Egyptian priests at Memphis. It honours the 13-year-old King Ptolemy V, whose Greek-speaking family ruled Egypt as pharaohs. The text appears three times: in hieroglyphs, in everyday Demotic script and in Greek.

British Museum

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The story behind the card

The decree thanks the king for cutting the taxes owed by temples and priests, and orders a statue of him to be set up and honoured in every temple in Egypt, with celebrations on his birthday. The stone is a fragment of a larger inscribed slab, called a stele, and fragments of three other copies of the decree have since been found. Centuries later it was broken and reused as building material. In July 1799, during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, French soldiers found it in the wall of a fort near the port of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta. When the British defeated the French, it passed to them under the surrender terms of 1801, and it has been on display at the British Museum in London almost continuously since 1802. Made of granodiorite, a dark granite-like rock, it is the museum's most visited single object.

Türkçe oku
Rosetta Taşı'nın üzerinde, Mısırlı rahiplerin MÖ 196'da Memfis'te toplanıp çıkardığı bir kararname yazılıdır. Kararname, 13 yaşındaki Kral V. Ptolemaios'u onurlandırır; ailesi Yunanca konuşan bu hanedan, Mısır'ı firavunlar gibi yönetiyordu. Metin taşta üç kez yer alır: hiyerogliflerle, gündelik Demotik yazıyla ve Yunanca.

Kararname, tapınakların ve rahiplerin vergilerini hafiflettiği için krala teşekkür eder; Mısır'daki her tapınağa onun bir heykelinin dikilip onurlandırılmasını, doğum gününde de kutlama yapılmasını buyurur. Taş aslında, stel denen ve üzeri yazılı daha büyük bir dikili taşın parçasıdır; aynı kararnamenin üç başka kopyasının parçaları da sonradan bulundu. Yüzyıllar sonra taş kırılıp yapı malzemesi olarak kullanıldı. Fransız askerleri taşı Temmuz 1799'da, Napolyon'un Mısır seferi sırasında, Avrupalıların Rosetta dediği Reşid limanının yakınında bir kalenin duvarında buldu. İngilizler Fransızları yenince taş, 1801'deki teslim anlaşmasıyla onlara geçti ve 1802'den bu yana neredeyse hiç ara vermeden Londra'daki British Museum'da sergileniyor. Taş, granite benzeyen koyu renkli bir kayaç olan granodiyorittendir ve müzenin en çok ziyaret edilen eseridir.

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Background reading: Rosetta Stone
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The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC. When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it, around 450 BC, it was already more than 2,000 years old.

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