Episode 1403
Unlocking History: The Rosetta Stone and the Code of the Pharaohs
pplpod · pplpod
December 31, 202522m 28s
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Show Notes
Join us as we examine the single most visited object in the British Museum: the Rosetta Stone,. Discovered in 1799 by a French soldier during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, this broken slab of granodiorite became the essential key to deciphering the mysteries of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs,,.
In this episode, we explore:
- The Decree: We analyze the text issued in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V, written in three distinct scripts: the "language of the gods" (hieroglyphs), the "language of documents" (Demotic), and the "language of the Greeks",.
- The Race to Decipher: How scholars like Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion used the Greek text to finally crack the code of a language that had been unreadable for over a thousand years,,.
- From French to British Hands: The story of how the stone was captured by the British Army in 1801 following the Capitulation of Alexandria and subsequently moved to London,.
- Modern Legacy: The ongoing calls from Egyptian archaeologists for the stone's repatriation and the stone's idiomatic status as a symbol for unlocking new fields of knowledge,.