63 Fun Facts About Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone was found in the delta of which river?

The Nile: the stone turned up near Rashid, where a branch of the river meets the sea. It had probably stood in a temple before being carted off and built into a wall as rubble.

Visitors to the museum that holds the Rosetta Stone are invited to do what with a copy kept in another gallery?

Touch it: the copy stands in the open, just as the real stone did when it first went on show. The original proved too tempting to visitors' fingers and has long since been shut away behind glass.

The Rosetta Stone gave its name to a well-known brand of what?

Language-learning software: Rosetta Stone, launched in 1992, borrows the stone's fame as the key to a lost language. Its method is the reverse of the decipherers', teaching with pictures and sounds and no translation at all.

Europe's Rosetta space probe carried a comet lander named after which Egyptian island?

Philae: a monument from the island carried a second two-language inscription that gave Champollion his final clues, so the European Space Agency named the lander after it and the mother ship after the stone.

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

Napoleon sailed home soon after the find, leaving his army and the stone behind. When that army surrendered, the stone passed to the British as a prize of war, which is why France's great find has spent two centuries abroad.

When the Rosetta Stone was carved, Egypt's kings descended from which conqueror's general?

Alexander the Great's death left Egypt to one of his generals, who made himself king; that general's family then held the throne for almost three centuries.

The Rosetta Stone's decree of 196 BC was issued on behalf of which ruler of Egypt?

Ptolemy V Epiphanes was about 13 when Egypt's priests issued it: in return for his gifts of silver and grain to their temples, they pledged to keep his birthday as a festival.

The Rosetta Stone, long mislabelled as black basalt, is actually made of which rock?

Granodiorite: the French newspaper that announced the find called it black granite, and reference books were still describing a basalt slab two centuries later.

Which French engineer lieutenant is credited with finding the Rosetta Stone as his men demolished an old wall?

Pierre-François Bouchard was overseeing repairs to a run-down fort when the slab turned up; he saw at once that it mattered and escorted it to the scholars in Cairo himself.

What are the oval rings around royal names on the Rosetta Stone called?

Cartouches: scholars guessed the rings held royal names, so the name repeated inside them on the stone gave the first hieroglyphs with known sounds. The French word means a gun cartridge.

What shows a reader of hieroglyphs, as on the Rosetta Stone, which end of a line to start from?

The way the figures face: birds, animals and people all look towards the start of the line, which let scribes run a text to the left or to the right.

Which 1801 agreement handed the Rosetta Stone to Britain?

The Capitulation of Alexandria: its sixteenth article gave up everything the French scholars had collected, and their commander's claim that the stone was his own property got him nowhere.

Which captured French frigate carried the Rosetta Stone to England in 1802?

HMS Égyptienne had been seized from the French only months earlier, and the officer escorting the stone sailed in her himself, 'determining to share its fate'.

Which British admiral wrecked the French fleet off Egypt in 1798, stranding the army that found the Rosetta Stone?

Horatio Nelson destroyed or captured most of the French ships, trapping the army in Egypt; three years later it had to hand its finds, the stone among them, to the British.

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

King George III: the escorting officer's orders were to present the slab to the King, who gave it to the nation within months. Both lines are painted on its sides.

Scholars guessed the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphs spelled foreign names by sound after seeing how which script writes them?

Chinese: its writers pick characters for their sounds alone to spell a foreign name, and scholars reasoned that Egyptian scribes had done the same with the foreign names on the stone.

Which British polymath found the signs spelling 'Ptolemaios' in the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphs?

Thomas Young, the physicist famed for his work on light, read the royal name but then stalled, because he believed hieroglyphs spelled out sounds only for foreign names.

The word 'hieroglyph' comes from Greek words meaning what?

Sacred carvings, from hieros and glyphe: the Greeks who coined the word believed the signs were holy symbols, a belief that kept later scholars hunting for mystical meanings instead of sounds.

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

Cleopatra shares the sounds p, o and l with the other name, so signs Champollion had guessed from one could be tested against the second, and the matches gave him the start of an alphabet.

By the traditional account, Champollion's breakthrough in September 1822 came from reading which two native pharaohs' names?

Ramesses and Thutmose were native Egyptian names many centuries older than the stone, so reading them showed hieroglyphs spelled out sounds in ordinary Egyptian words, not only in foreign names.

Demotic, the name of the Rosetta Stone's middle script, comes from a Greek word meaning what?

Of the people: demotic was Egypt's everyday handwriting, and because its band of text survived best of the three on the stone, the first attempts at decipherment began there.

By family legend, what did Champollion do after shouting 'Je tiens mon affaire!'?

Collapsed in a faint: the cry means 'I've got it!', and the story goes that he lay senseless for days before getting up to present his discovery in Paris later that month.

Champollion's grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris is marked by which Egyptian-style monument?

A simple obelisk: the plain stone needle carries the name 'Champollion le Jeune', the Younger, which set him apart from the elder brother who was a scholar too.

Champollion's English rival published his readings of the Rosetta Stone in 1819 in which reference work?

Encyclopædia Britannica: his long article 'Egypt' gave his readings of a few names, but he could get no further, and three years later Champollion overtook him.

When the Rosetta Stone's boy-king was crowned, Egypt had recently lost which land to the Seleucids?

Judaea: the Seleucid king Antiochus III had beaten Egypt's army at Panium, and rebels still held the south of the country when the boy was crowned.

The Rosetta Stone's decree was issued by priests gathered in which city, the ancient capital of Egypt?

Memphis: by then the court sat on the coast, so holding the ceremony in the old capital tied the young king to the pharaohs of the past and to the priests whose support he needed.

Champollion's decisive insight was that hieroglyphs are which kind of script?

Part sounds, part symbols: one sign may spell a sound while the next stands for a whole word or idea, which is why reading the script as pure picture-code had failed for centuries.

Why is much of the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphic text missing?

Its top broke off: the stone is only part of a taller monument, and although the site where it was found has been searched, no missing piece has ever turned up.

Egypt was a province of which empire when French troops found the Rosetta Stone there in 1799?

The Ottoman Empire had held Egypt since 1517, and its troops fought beside the British to drive the French out, so in 1801 the French gave up the country to both allies.

A marble tablet to Champollion's English rival hangs in which London church?

Westminster Abbey: the epitaph credits him, not Champollion, with being first to penetrate 'the obscurity which had veiled for ages the hieroglyphicks of Egypt'.

The fort whose wall hid the Rosetta Stone was built by a sultan of which slave-soldier dynasty?

The Mamluks, who rose from slave soldiers to rule Egypt from 1250, built the fort around 1470, and their masons used the slab as ordinary building stone.

Cleaning the Rosetta Stone's darkened surface revealed what running across its top-left corner?

A pink vein: stripped of its dark coating, the slab long described as black proved to be dark grey rock with a pink streak.

The general whose army found the Rosetta Stone told his troops that forty centuries looked down on them from where?

The Pyramids: he said it before the Battle of the Pyramids in July 1798, and the victory there opened Cairo to the French and to the scholars travelling with them.

Where was the Rosetta Stone hidden for two years from 1917 to protect it from air raids?

A postal railway station: work on the Post Office's new mail tunnels had been halted by the war, and the stone waited out the raids about 15 metres under Holborn.

The Rosetta Stone has left Britain on loan to which museum?

The Louvre in Paris: the loan let Champollion's countrymen see at last the stone that their army had dug up and lost, and that one of their own had decoded.

Hieroglyphs were first read again in 1822, exactly a century before which famous discovery in Egypt?

Tutankhamun's tomb: a workman uncovered its first step on 4 November 1922, and the name stamped on the sealed doorway, readable thanks to the decipherment, told the diggers whose tomb it was.

Zahi Hawass has campaigned for the return of the Rosetta Stone and which queen's bust?

Nefertiti: her painted bust has been in Germany since 1913, and Egypt began asking for it in 1924, as soon as it went on public show.

A marble Champollion that long stood at the Collège de France is by Bartholdi, sculptor of which landmark?

The Statue of Liberty: Bartholdi had toured Egypt as a young man and once pitched a colossal torch-bearing statue for the entrance to the Suez Canal.

Among the good deeds listed in the Rosetta Stone's decree, the king is thanked for cutting what for his subjects?

Their taxes: for all its fame the text is everyday politics, a list of dues cut or cancelled and favours granted, which one writer has called a propaganda poster carved in stone.

At first, French scholars mistook the Rosetta Stone's middle text for which script?

Syriac: the newspaper report that announced the find said the middle band used 'characters which are believed to be Syriac', before anyone recognised a script of Egypt's own.

Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who inked the Rosetta Stone to print copies from it, is better known for inventing what?

The modern pencil: with a wartime blockade cutting off English graphite, Conté mixed graphite powder with clay and fired it, the recipe pencils have used ever since.

Which Swedish diplomat published an alphabet of demotic signs worked out from the Rosetta Stone in 1802?

Johan David Åkerblad matched the royal names to groups of demotic signs and built an alphabet from them, but because he assumed every sign was a letter he could get no further.

The Rosetta Stone's decree praises the king's gifts to the cult of Apis, a sacred what?

Bull: Apis was a living bull honoured as a god, and the decree praises the king for paying whatever its festivals and its grand burial required.

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

Joseph Fourier had served in Egypt as secretary to the expedition's scholars, and the story goes that he showed the eleven-year-old Champollion his own Egyptian collection, hieroglyphs included.

Which language did Champollion master as his key to the hieroglyphs?

Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, lived on in the services of Egypt's Christian church, written in Greek letters, so its words still carried sounds that the hieroglyphs had once spelled.

On his expedition to Egypt, Champollion met which ruler, who gave the French the monument now in the Place de la Concorde?

Muhammad Ali Pasha offered the French a pair of ancient monuments from Luxor; only one made the journey, and Champollion, who had studied them on the spot, died four years before it was raised in Paris.

By his own account, how did Colonel Turner carry off the Rosetta Stone?

On an artillery cart: Turner wrote that he hauled the stone through narrow streets with a squad of gunners, 'amid the sarcasms of numbers of French officers and men'.

Which 17th-century Jesuit polymath claimed to have deciphered hieroglyphs, though nearly all his translations were wrong?

Athanasius Kircher published volumes of confident translations in the 1650s, reading mystical sentences into signs that spell plain words.

Which ancient script remains unread, partly because no 'Rosetta Stone' pairing it with a known script has been found?

The Indus script: its inscriptions average only about five signs, and none has turned up beside a translation, so there is nothing to set it against as scholars set the stone's three texts side by side.

The Rosetta Stone's decree records the king's response to which natural event in his eighth year?

An unusually high river flood: the decree boasts that the king had the swollen channels dammed, one of the deeds for which the priests voted him divine honours.

In the Rosetta Stone's own Egyptian wording, hieroglyphs are called the writing of the words of whom?

The gods: by then hieroglyphs were used almost only by priests for temple and ritual texts, while the decree calls its everyday script simply the writing of documents.

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

67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko: ESA borrowed the stone's name because it hoped the comet's little-altered ice and dust would be a key to how the Solar System formed.

Apple's Rosetta software, a namesake of the Rosetta Stone, was designed to let Mac computers do what?

Run apps built for older chips: Rosetta rewrites a program's instructions for the new processor, which let Apple switch chip families in 2006 and again in 2020 without stranding old software.

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

Behistun: Darius the Great had it carved about 100 metres up a cliff face, and its three matching texts let scholars crack cuneiform as the stone's had opened hieroglyphs.

Champollion's scholarly elder brother is known by the family surname joined to the name of what?

Their home town: both brothers were born in the small town of Figeac, so the elder became Champollion-Figeac while the decipherer stayed plain Champollion, or 'the Younger'.

After cracking the hieroglyphs, Champollion tested his system on the great Egyptian collection of which city?

Turin: France had turned down the hoard of antiquities gathered by its own consul in Egypt, so Turin's king bought it, and in 1824 Champollion came to try out his readings on its papyri.

Qaitbay, whose fort hid the Rosetta Stone, built another on the ruins of which ancient landmark?

The Pharos lighthouse: earthquakes had brought it down, and around 1480 Qaitbay's builders reused its fallen blocks for a harbour citadel, just as his fort at Rashid reused the slab.

The Canopus Decree, the Rosetta Stone's older cousin, tried adding what to Egypt's calendar?

Leap day: the priests ordered a sixth extra day every fourth year to stop the calendar drifting through the seasons, but Egyptians ignored the reform until Augustus imposed it some two centuries later.

Which Roman emperor's order closing pagan temples in the 390s probably shut the Rosetta Stone's first home?

Theodosius I: with the temples shut, the priests who could still read hieroglyphs died out, and the last inscription known to have been carved in them dates from AD 394.

By what French word are the experts who travelled with the Rosetta Stone's finders known?

The savants: these engineers, naturalists, artists and printers followed the army, and the copies they inked from the stone were the first to reach Europe's scholars.

Champollion's English rival, a physician, is remembered in physics for showing that light travels as what?

Waves: his experiments with overlapping beams upset Newton's view that light is a stream of particles, and he later took up the stone's puzzle as a pastime for his leisure hours.

When Britain claimed the French scholars' collections, what did Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire threaten to do?

Burn them all: he warned the British general that history would blame him for the burning of a second great library, and the scholars were allowed to keep their natural history specimens.

A Greek king's two-script coins were the 'Rosetta Stone' for which ancient Indian script?

Brahmi: the coins give the king's name in both scripts, which let Christian Lassen pin down several letters in 1836, and James Prinsep completed the decipherment soon after.