2024-04-25
The exhibition "Hieroglyphs unlocking Ancient Egypt" will run at the British Museum until 19 February. The exhibition looks back over 200 years of attempts to decipher hieroglyphs and the discoveries that followed the landmark.
In the exhibition at the British Museum, the viewer has the opportunity to trace the struggles of many generations of researchers trying to uncover the secrets of the ancient Egyptians. The exhibition takes the viewer from the time of medieval Arab travellers, through Renaissance scholars to the advances of French scholar Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) and English scholar Thomas Young (1773-1829) and beyond. The most important Egyptian artefacts that made the reading of hieroglyphs possible and that viewers will see in the exhibition include The Rosetta Stone, fragments from the Book of the Dead and a granite sarcophagus from the 26th Dynasty.
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of an ancient stele with a decree inscribed on it. Issued on 27 March 196 BC by the influential priests of a temple in Memphis, Egypt, it bestowed divine honours on King Ptolemy V (r. 204-181 BC) in return for his good deeds to his country. In order to make the decree widely understood, it was written in three scripts: in Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic script and ancient Greek. The monument was discovered by soldiers of the Napoleonic army in 1799 while digging the foundations for an extension to a fort near the city of el-Rashid (Rosetta). Under the Treaty of Alexandria (1801), the stone became the property of the English after Napoleon's defeat. As early as 27 September 1822. Jean-Francois Champollion informed the world of the reading of the Egyptian hieroglyphs engraved on the Rosetta Stone. The reading of the hieroglyphs made it possible for the first time to study the history of Ancient Egypt on the basis of Egyptian rather than Greek sources. The Rosetta Stone is now housed in the Egyptian Gallery at the British Museum. Egypt is constantly striving to recover the monument.