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In Our Time: The Rosetta Stone

11/02/2021

The Rosetta Stone

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Rosetta Stone

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the deciphering of hieroglyphs, secret for 1,500 years.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of Champollion in deciphering the hieroglyphs on The Rosetta Stone, when the written culture of ancient Egypt opened to the modern world.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most famous museum objects in the world, shown in the image above in replica, and dating from around 196 BC.   It is a damaged, dark granite block on which you can faintly see three scripts engraved: Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle and Hieroglyphs at the top. Napoleon’s soldiers found it in a Mamluk fort at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast, and soon realised the Greek words could be used to unlock the hieroglyphs.  It was another 20 years before Champollion deciphered them, becoming the first to understand the hieroglyphs since they fell out of use 1500 years before and so opening up the written culture of ancient Egypt to the modern age.

With 
Penelope Wilson
Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Durham University

Campbell Price
Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum

And

Richard Bruce Parkinson
Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

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