When people think of ancient Egypt, they can't help but think of the majestic pyramids and the Nile River, which flows like a long river. These two symbols seem to be the whole of ancient Egyptian history, but in reality, they are only the tip of the iceberg. If we want to truly explore the mysteries of ancient Egypt, we must rely on the preserved written historical sources. Unfortunately, the reading of ancient Egyptian texts has long since been lost, making our understanding of this ancient civilization confusing.
Before the 18th century, Egypt's history was shrouded in a thick fog that gave only a glimpse of the tip of the iceberg. The fragments that have been handed down, mostly from the pen of Greek and Roman writers, give us an incomplete outline. They are like faint lights, illuminating that period of history, but they cannot dispel all the fog. People aspire to one day unravel the secrets of hieroglyphics and unravel the mysteries of ancient Egyptian history.
However, just when people were about to lose hope, there was finally a light at the end of the tunnel. In 1799, when Napoleon led an expedition to Egypt, his soldiers found a black basalt tablet near the city of Rosetta. The tablet bears the same inscription, but it is recorded in three different languages: ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, folk scripts, and Greek scripts. This stele, known as the "Rosetta Stele" by later generations, was like a lightning bolt that pierced the darkness of history.
The appearance of the Rosetta monument has aroused great interest among scholars across the globe. They tried to decipher the words on the stele and explore the mystery behind it. The Greek script was quickly deciphered, and the text in the middle of the stele was quickly identified as the folk script of ancient Egypt. However, although scholars understood the meaning of hieroglyphs and folk scripts through Greek, they have not been able to unravel the mystery of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Just when people are in trouble, a young French teenager comes forward. His name was Jean-François Champollion and he was only 11 years old at the time. He became intrigued by the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stele and decided to uncover the secrets of these ancient scripts. He worked hard for 21 years to read the hieroglyphs of King Ptolemy and Queen Cleopatra of Egypt against Greek. The text can be spelled from right to left, left to right, and even top to bottom. Champollion was thus convinced that the pictorial symbols in hieroglyphs mainly represented the consonant symbols of pronunciation. After a painstaking effort, in 1822, after more than 100 years of confusion, Champollion finally succeeded in solving the mystery of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
It turned out that the inscription on the "Rosetta Stele" was a letter of gratitude written by the monks of the city of Memphis, Egypt, to the then king Ptolemy in 196 BC. This king was Pharaoh Ptolemy of the Fifteenth Dynasty. Soon after he ascended to the throne, he abolished the taxes due to the monks and opened up a new source of money for the temple, introducing special protective measures that brought a series of benefits to the monks, so he won their respect. So the monks wrote this letter of gratitude and engraved it on this black basalt stele in three fonts.
The city of Rosetta is famous worldwide for this stone monument that solves the mysteries of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, this famous stele is no longer in Rosetta City, but is housed in the British Museum in London. This stele is not only a key to unlock the history of ancient Egypt, but also a bridge between the past and the present, allowing us to cross the gap between time and space and get a glimpse of the mysteries of that ancient civilization.
In addition, Egyptian hieroglyphs were produced around 4000 BC. Like Sumerian, Old Indic, and Chinese oracle bone inscriptions, they evolved from the simplest drawings and patterns of primitive societies. But the original Egyptian hieroglyphs were only a pictorial script, and only later did they gradually develop into hieroglyphs. These hieroglyphs are composed of three symbols: symbols, musical notes, and radicals. Symbols are used to represent the concept or definition of things in pictures, musical notes are used to represent the sounds made by things, and radicals are used to distinguish symbols in different categories, similar to radicals in Chinese characters.
At different stages of ancient Egyptian history, Egyptian hieroglyphs changed many times in response to the needs of social life. Priestly scripts appeared during the Middle Kingdom, folk scripts appeared in Egypt in the later periods, and Coptic scripts (Egyptian scripts adapted from the Greek alphabet) appeared during Roman rule. Due to various historical reasons, the ancient Egyptian script did not develop into an alphabetic script. However, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs had an important influence on the formation of the Phoenician alphabet.
With the decline of ancient Egyptian civilization, its hieroglyphs gradually became dead words and were forgotten. It wasn't until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and Champollion's successful interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs that the entire history of ancient Egypt was revealed. This stele not only provides us with a window into the culture of ancient Egypt.