Rosetta Stone - Rediscovery

Rediscovery

On Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt, the expeditionary army was accompanied by the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a corps of 167 technical experts (savants). On July 15, 1799, as French soldiers under the command of Colonel d'Hautpoul were strengthening the defences of Fort Julien, a couple of miles north-east of the Egyptian port city of Rosetta (Modern day Rashid), Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard spotted a slab with inscriptions on one side that the soldiers had uncovered. He and d'Hautpoul saw at once that it might be important and informed general Jacques-François Menou, who happened to be at Rosetta. The find was announced to Napoleon's newly founded scientific association in Cairo, the Institut d'Égypte, in a report by Commission member Michel Ange Lancret noting that it contained three inscriptions, the first in hieroglyphs and the third in Greek, and rightly suggesting that the three inscriptions would be versions of the same text. Lancret's report, dated July 19, 1799, was read to a meeting of the Institute soon after July 25. Bouchard, meanwhile, transported the stone to Cairo for examination by scholars. Napoleon himself inspected what had already begun to be called la Pierre de Rosette, the Rosetta Stone, shortly before his return to France in August 1799.

The discovery was reported in Courrier de l'Égypte, the official newspaper of the French expedition, in September: the anonymous reporter expressed a hope that the stone might one day be the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. In 1800, three of the Commission's technical experts devised ways to make copies of the texts on the stone. One of these, the printer and gifted linguist Jean-Joseph Marcel, is credited as the first to recognise that the middle text, originally guessed to be Syriac, was, in fact, written in the Egyptian demotic script, rarely used for stone inscriptions and, therefore, seldom seen by scholars at that time. It was the artist and inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté who found a way to use the stone itself as a printing block; a slightly different method for reproducing the inscriptions was adopted by Antoine Galland. The prints that resulted were taken to Paris by General Charles Dugua. Scholars in Europe were now able to see the inscriptions and attempt to read them.

After Napoleon's departure, French troops held off British and Ottoman attacks for a further 18 months. In March 1801, the British landed at Aboukir Bay. General Jacques-François Menou, who had been one of the first to see the stone in 1799, was now in command of the French expedition. His troops, including the Commission, marched north towards the Mediterranean coast to meet the enemy, transporting the stone along with other antiquities of all kinds. Defeated in battle, Menou and the remnant of his army retreated to Alexandria where they were surrounded and besieged, the stone now inside the city. He admitted defeat and surrendered on August 30.