Blog Post #44 - What is Rosetta Stone? Why Should you care?

If you have not heard about it we can learn it now.

If you think it is a company selling language packages - learn spanish in 20days . You are correct. Some one did create a successful company using that name. 

There is a long history and story which involves Egypt, England and France. 

Here it is in brief - with all names and places removed except  the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta where the stone was found.

This stone has same message in 3 languages. The 3 languages are

Priest's language  - Hieroglyphs

Ruler's language  - Greek

Common People's Language- Demotic 

The Priest's of Egypt were very powerful and they crowned the 12 year old king and blessed him and told him that they will serve along with him. Now there is also something gold silver that needs to be given to the Priest by the king (who may not have even know that he is a king but a prince).
At that time the language people spoke in Egypt was Demotic. The rulers were Greek.

There you go. Now when the stone was discovered - while it was being used as a building material by French, taken over by British and finally now in British museum was the key to a lot of stuff that we know about Egypt.

How? Ok. You know the Mummies and the pyramids and the phoenix and the King Tut stuff.
Guess what , if someone didn't take time to use the greek and map out the Hieroglyphs we would never know what was written inside the pyramids.

So in a way Rosetta stone is seen as a concept - a sample which represented a key with which the whole was uncovered. Now the next time you see the Mummies or the Pyramids think Rosetta.

Without somebody repeating themselves in 3 languages we would know the lost one. Think how it would have been if all 3 had been lost.! 

Remember the Greek always survived including the 2008 recession!

Happy Learning
Sivakumar Manikanteswaran