70 Fun Facts About Rosetta Stone

The stone was found near the delta of which river?

It came from a fort on the river's Bolbitine branch, near the port town of Rashid.

Soldiers of which country's army uncovered the stone while rebuilding a fort?

They were rebuilding a fort during their invasion of Egypt; the British took the stone from them two years later.

The stone is famous above all as the key to reading which script?

Nobody had been able to read it since shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire.

Which institution has housed the stone since 1802?

It was too heavy for the floors of the original Montagu House and moved to the sculpture gallery in 1834.

Which French leader's 1798 invasion of Egypt led to the stone's discovery?

He returned to Europe the following August, abandoning his troops and the stone in Egypt.

The decree carved on the Rosetta Stone was issued in which year?

It dates from the ninth year of the boy-king's reign, a year after his official coronation.

The decree on the stone was issued on behalf of which ruler?

He was still a teenager; the decree established his divine cult and pledged that his birthday and coronation day would be celebrated annually.

The bottom register of the stone is written in which language?

It was the language of the Ptolemaic government, and the starting point for every attempt at decipherment.

The stone is made of which rock, long misidentified as black basalt?

Chalk in the letters and a wax coating darkened it; the rock likely came from a quarry at Gebel Tingar near Aswan.

Which French officer spotted the inscribed slab as soldiers strengthened the fort's defences?

He was a lieutenant strengthening the fort's defences when soldiers demolishing a wall uncovered it.

The stone had been reused as building material in which stronghold near Rashid?

The French had renamed the old Mamluk fort; the town itself was known to Europeans as Rosetta.

In which year was the stone rediscovered by the French?

The French Army of the Orient had invaded Egypt the year before, bringing 151 scholars with it.

In which city has the stone been on public display almost continuously since 1802?

It is the most visited single object in its museum, and its image was the best-selling postcard there for decades.

Under the terms of which 1801 agreement did the stone pass from French to British hands?

General Menou had tried to claim it as his private property; the British refused to lift the siege until he gave in.

The stone was shipped to England aboard which captured French frigate?

It landed in February 1802 with orders that it be presented to the King.

At which English port did the stone land in February 1802?

It was shown to the Society of Antiquaries in March before being sent to the museum by the end of the year.

Inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone say it was 'Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801' and 'Presented by' whom?

The War Secretary, Lord Hobart, acted for the King in directing it to the museum.

Champollion announced his decipherment in 1822 in a famous letter addressed to whom?

The recipient was secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions; the letter was written the same day as the public lecture.

Which British polymath found the phonetic signs spelling 'Ptolemaios' in the hieroglyphic text?

He put his findings in the 'Egypt' article of the 1819 Encyclopædia Britannica but could get no further.

Roughly how many similarities between the hieroglyphic and demotic texts did the British scholar note?

Until then the two scripts were thought to be entirely different; he correctly deduced demotic was only partly phonetic.

Alongside 'Ptolemaios', which royal name did Champollion read phonetically from an obelisk in 1822?

With two names sharing letters he could quickly build an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphs.

In 1823 Champollion confirmed his system by reading which two pharaohs' names in Abu Simbel cartouches?

These were native Egyptian names, far older than the Ptolemies, proving phonetic signs were not just for foreign words.

In which small town in the Lot department was Champollion born in 1790?

His older brother later added the town's name to his own surname to tell the two scholars apart.

What did Champollion reportedly shout on 14 September 1822 before collapsing?

He was running to find his brother; the breakthrough came from the verb for 'birth' and new texts from Abu Simbel.

Champollion's grave in Père Lachaise cemetery is marked by what, erected by his wife?

He died of a stroke in Paris in 1832, worn out by his expedition to Egypt.

How old was Champollion when he died in 1832?

His Egyptian grammar and hieroglyphic dictionary were published only after his death.

At what age was the boy-king honoured by the decree crowned, seven years into his reign?

Both a Seleucid war and a revolt in Upper Egypt were still under way at the time.

The decree was issued by a congress of priests gathered in which city, the ancient capital of Egypt?

The choice showed how badly the young king needed the support of the High Priests there rather than of Greek-speaking Alexandria.

The stele is thought to have originally stood in a temple at which royal town, not where it was found?

That temple was probably closed around AD 392 when Theodosius I shut all non-Christian temples.

How tall is the Rosetta Stone at its highest point?

It is a fragment of a much larger stele; no other pieces were ever found at Rosetta.

Approximately how much does the stone weigh?

The captured Egyptian antiquities proved too heavy for the floors of Montagu House and needed a new extension.

How many lines of Greek text does the bottom register contain?

Only the first 27 survive in full; a diagonal break destroys the rest at the bottom right.

Only how many lines of the hieroglyphic text remain visible on the damaged top register?

The demotic middle register fared best, which is why the earliest decipherment work focused on it.

The 1999 cleaning of the stone revealed what feature running across its top-left corner?

The vein is typical of rock from the Aswan region and helped identify the quarry.

What had been applied to the stone's surface to protect it from visitors' fingers, darkening it?

The inscriptions had also been filled with white chalk to make them easier to read.

Where was the stone hidden for two years from 1917 to protect it from bombing?

It sat 15 metres below Mount Pleasant sorting office on the Postal Tube Railway.

Apart from wartime, the stone has left its museum only once, in October 1972. Where did it go?

It was shown next to Champollion's letter on the 150th anniversary of its publication.

What is the stone's museum inventory number?

The others in that batch of French-captured objects include a sarcophagus of Nectanebo II and a large granite fist.

In which year did Zahi Hawass first publicly call for the stone's return to Egypt?

He called it the 'icon of our Egyptian identity' and repeated the demand as recently as 2022.

What did the stone's custodians present to Egypt in 2005?

It went on show in the Rashid National Museum, an Ottoman house in the town nearest the find spot.

Which printer-linguist on the French expedition first identified the middle text as demotic?

Demotic was rarely used for stone inscriptions and scholars had seldom seen it.

The middle text had originally been mistaken for which script?

The demotic script was so unfamiliar that a Swedish diplomat working on it assumed it was a late, cursive form of Egyptian.

Which artist and inventor devised a way to use the stone itself as a printing block?

The resulting prints went to Paris and let European scholars study the inscriptions without seeing the stone.

Which Swedish diplomat published a 29-letter demotic alphabet in 1802, more than half of it correct?

He got the letters from Greek names in the demotic text but could not crack the ideographic signs.

In 1802 Silvestre de Sacy reported that he had identified how many names in the demotic text?

They were Alexandros, Alexandreia, Ptolemaios, Arsinoe and the title Epiphanes.

Which mathematician, as prefect of Grenoble, encouraged young Champollion's interest in Egypt?

He had gone to Egypt with the French expedition and was editing the expedition's monumental publication.

Which living language descended from Ancient Egyptian did Champollion learn as his key to the hieroglyphs?

He wrote to his brother that he dreamed in it and translated everything that came into his head into it for fun.

Who presented an English translation of the Greek text to the Society of Antiquaries in April 1802?

It stayed unpublished until 1811, when it appeared in a special issue of the journal Archaeologia.

Which colonel escorted the stone to England, claiming he seized it himself on a gun-carriage?

Other accounts say a French informant led British scholars to it in the back streets of Alexandria.

According to Edward Daniel Clarke, where was the stone when the British were secretly shown it?

The French informant feared French soldiers would steal it if they saw it.

Which 5th-century work explaining almost 200 glyphs misled would-be decipherers for centuries?

Its author, the priest Horapollo, treated the signs as pure symbols rather than a writing system.

Which 17th-century Jesuit failed to decipher hieroglyphs, calling them the 'riddle of the Sphinx'?

Medieval Arab historians had earlier tried comparing the signs with the language of Egypt's Christians, centuries before Champollion did the same.

The boy-king's parents were murdered in a conspiracy involving which mistress of his father?

The conspirators ruled as his guardians until a mob in Alexandria lynched her and her family two years later.

The Battle of Panium in 198 BC cost the Ptolemies which territory, including Judaea?

Antiochus III and Philip V of Macedon had made a pact to carve up Egypt's overseas possessions.

The decree records the king responding to which natural event in the eighth year of his reign?

He had the excess water dammed for the farmers' benefit, and also gave silver and grain to the temples.

The Rosetta decree orders copies in the 'language of the Greeks', 'of documents', and the 'language of' what?

That third one is the hieroglyphic script; demotic was the 'language of documents'.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft was sent to study which comet?

The name signalled the hope that the comet's composition would be a key to the Solar System's origins.

Per the OED, the first figurative use of 'Rosetta stone' came in a 1902 entry on the chemical analysis of what?

H. G. Wells later used the phrase in The Shape of Things to Come for a shorthand manuscript that unlocked other papers.

Which trilingual inscription in Iran, in Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian, is compared to the Rosetta Stone?

The Sardis bilingual plays a similar role for the Lydian language.

In 1802 plaster casts of the inscriptions went to Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and where else?

Prints followed soon after and circulated among scholars across Europe.

The first English translation of the Rosetta Stone, in 1858, came from a student society at which university?

Three members of its Philomathean Society produced it, decades after French and Latin versions.

What was true of the Champollion and Young likenesses that French and English visitors each complained about?

The plagiarism feud between the two camps had been running since the 1820s.

The fort at Rashid in which the stone was found had originally been built by which Mamluk sultan?

It defended the river's Bolbitine branch, and the stone lay in its foundations for at least three centuries.

A Ptolemaic trilingual inscription of 238 BC, slightly earlier than the Rosetta Stone, was issued where?

The Decree of Alexandria of 243 BC and the Memphis decree of Ptolemy IV of about 218 BC are the others.

Which emperor's order closing non-Christian temples around AD 392 probably shut the stele's original home?

Egyptian temples were later quarried for building stone, which is likely how the broken stele ended up in a fort at Rashid.

How many technical experts, or savants, accompanied Napoleon's Army of the Orient to Egypt in 1798?

The corps was known as the Commission des Sciences et des Arts; the stone was found as soldiers under Colonel d'Hautpoul shored up Fort Julien.

In which French occupation newspaper was the stone's discovery first reported in September 1799?

The anonymous reporter hoped the stone might one day be the key to deciphering hieroglyphs.

Which French scholar warned the British that the savants would rather burn their finds than surrender them?

He referred ominously to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria; Clarke and Hamilton then pleaded the scholars' case to Hutchinson.

By which year had the British Museum found it necessary to put the stone in a protective frame?

It originally sat at a slight angle in a metal cradle, which required shaving tiny portions off its sides to fit.

Which Greco-Bactrian king's bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins have been called 'little Rosetta stones'?

They allowed Christian Lassen to make initial progress towards deciphering the Brahmi script.