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Indepth Arts News:
"Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment"
1999-07-10 until 2000-01-10
The British Museum
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
In mid-July 1799, what has since become one of the most famous of all Egyptian
antiquities was found on the banks of the Nile. This exhibition about the decipherment
of scripts celebrates the bicentenary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone,
immediately acclaimed at the time as a `most valuable relic of Antiquity'. The Rosetta
Stone is a the remains of a stela inscribed with a priestly decree for Ptolemy V
(196BC) in three scripts; hieroglyphic, a cursive form of ancient Egyptian, and ancient
Greek. The Stone is long established as an instantly recognisable icon of script and
decipherment, and one of the objects on display in the British Museum which attracts
most visitors. T
The exhibition shows the variety of the world's writing systems and
relate the story of the Stone's discovery, how it entered the British Museum in 1802,
and how it inspired decipherment by the young Francois Champollion in 1822. This
remarkable achievement is set in context by displays of other contemporaneous
decipherments.
This is a fresh presentation of the Rosetta Stone and its world. One section
demonstrates how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs, a uniquely beautiful mixture of
pictures and sound-signs. Another section looks at how the Stone has allowed us to
read ancient Egyptian culture as a whole and examines the role and effects of writing
in a single culture through over 3000 years, in comparison to other cultures. A wide
variety of objects highlights the uses of writing, the magical properties of hieroglyphs,
and the spectacular relationship between hieroglyphs and Egyptian art .
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