Talk:Rosetta Stone

New article on "Rosetta stones" of similar utility?

One going beyond the " Idiomatic use" section. I have also placed a proposal for a new category at Category talk:Multilingual texts#Key to reading forgotten scripts.

Several historical bi- or multilingual inscriptions have been used to decipher a script and language not understood until their discovery. While multilingual texts are almost countless, such "Rosetta stones" are very rare and important: they deserve a category and article of their own.

Here a few, as an incentive:

• Behistun Inscription
• Karatepe bilingual
• Orkhon inscriptions
• Rosetta Stone

Anyone? Arminden (talk) 14:10, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Multilingual inscription already lists several important examples. Maybe expand on that? Arminden (talk) 14:14, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, there's no justification to create a new article unless the topic already exists as such in sources. Remsense ‥ 论 18:01, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Constructive, please. The Rosetta stone method/principle is notable. A list is something else, esp. one that doesn't even mention the languages present, let alone which one helped decipher which. Arminden (talk) 19:22, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Not sure what wasn't constructive. If it's well attested, then that's fine. Remsense ‥ 论 19:29, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

I have started a new section, multilingual inscription#As means for decipherment. A table would be quite fitting there, especially once the list is expanded. Arminden (talk) 17:52, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

Full Date of Discovery

I'm surprised that the full date of discovery isn't in the article or the fact box; only the month and the year are specified.

The book The Book of This Day in History gives July 15, 1799 as the date.

Encyclopedia Britannica claims the stone was found in August of 1799. (Rosetta Stone article on britannica.com)

Can we get the actual date from a reliable source? ProfessorTom (talk) 12:51, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Parkinson 1999 says (pp. 19–20): "The discovery was made in mid-July, shortly before the second battle of Abuqir on 25 July... A letter by the engineer Michelange Lancret was received by the Institut d'Égypte in Cairo at its meeting of 19 July and the Stone itself reached Cairo under the charge of Bouchard in mid-August, as Napoleon was departing." The announcement of the discovery in Courier d'Égypte, which is linked in Note A of this article, was printed in September, though the dateline of the specific bulletin about the stone is 2 Fructidor in the French Republican calendar (20 or 21 August; I'm not sure which day it would be that year).

Parkinson seems to have the most specific information about the timing of the discovery, which would definitely place it before July 19 but not with any more precision. Presumably the date of arrival in Cairo or the date of the bulletin are the reason why Britannica says August. Our current paragraph about the discovery is cited to Parkinson, but doesn't exactly match it; it gives a discovery date of July 15 and then says "Lancret's report, dated 19 July 1799, was read to a meeting of the Institute soon after 25 July." I don't know where either the July 15 or July 25 dates come from, so, in the absence of an explanation, I'll change the text to match Parkinson. A. Parrot (talk) 13:32, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

This is an excellent and very prompt reply.

For what it's worth, I have a second non-authoratative source that claims the stone was discovered on July 15, a 365 Day "On This Day in History" desk-calendar. Of course, it has no citations. ProfessorTom (talk) 14:13, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Ignore it, I'm sure they took it from Wikipedia.

The army was preparing for further campaigns while the savants were roaming the conquered lands, trying to survive disease and attacks, sweating their derrières off and cursing the day they were born into this world along creatures like Napoleon and mosquitoes. Unless one of them made a logbook note which survived the centuries, there's no way to pinpoint the exact day. And nobody really cared till popular printware publishers started producing those "On This Day in History" calendars and illustrated books. Arminden (talk) 14:43, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Out of curiosity I tried to trace this detail back in our versions. In the text that was submitted for featured status in 2010 I wrote "mid-July", and surely I took that from Parkinson, whose work I read and cited. However, when I was invited to submit this article to the Wiki Journal of Humanities, in 2017, the text had already been altered to "15 July" and the footnote citation to Don Benjamin's Stones and stories (Fortress Press, 2009) had been added. I guess I assumed that the exact date came from Benjamin: I'm ashamed to say that I didn't verify whether that is the case, and, more important, whether Benjamin had any justification for giving that date. I think it's unlikely, and "mid-July" is the best date that we can give. Andrew Dalby 17:01, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

A. Parrot,

Forgive me for being uninformed, but who or what is Parkinson in this context? ProfessorTom (talk) 16:24, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

In the article's source list, Parkinson 1999 is Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (1999) by Richard B. Parkinson. A. Parrot (talk) 16:56, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

Weight of Stone

The weight of the Rosetta Stone is not in the fact box. There is a weight given in the article

It weighs approximately 760 kilograms (1,680 lb)

but the source for that weight is a dead webpage that was not archived at the time of retrieval.

There is this updated blog entry from the British Museum, but it does not include the weight of the stone.

Can we get an authoritative source for the weight of the stone? ProfessorTom (talk) 14:33, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Solé and Valbelle 2002, p. 4, gives 720 kilograms. Given the discrepancy, I'd prefer to find a source from the museum, which seems more likely to know the actual weight, but the British Museum print publications cited in this article, Quirke and Andrews 1989 and Parkinson 2005, are not accessible to me. A. Parrot (talk) 22:09, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

What are the 3 languages?

This should be included in the infobox. The art. takes the pain to strongly stress that "These three scripts are (sic!) not three different languages, as is commonly misunderstood" (a script never IS a language), but what languages are there represented on the stele?

1. the "language of the gods", written in Egyptian hieroglyphs: Ancient Egyptian, according to the lead. If so, an official (literary or cultic) form of it?
2. the "language of documents", written in Demotic: some kind of administrative Egyptian, somewhat related to the later Christian Coptic? So is it still Ancient Egyptian, as written in the lead, or actually not?
3. the "language of the Greeks", as used by the Ptolemaic government. So the Ptolemaic court version of Hellenistic Greek. The lead states: Ancient Greek - were the Ptolemies archaising, i.e. using a dead form of Greek? Or are we actually talking of Hellenistic Greek (Koine Greek)?

We might have one or two forms of Egyptian, and quite likely a different form of Greek than stated in the lead. Pls clarify and add this info to the infobox:

• hieroglyphs used to write Ancient Egyptian
• Demotic used to write (a different version of?) Ancient Egyptian
• Greek script used to write Hellenistic (?) Greek. Arminden (talk) 15:25, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

I've changed the text to clarify the relationship between the two. Whether they are "separate languages" depends on whether you regard chronologically distinct phases of the same language as one language or two, so I wrote the text to sidestep that problem of definitions. (Probably you would call them two if you saw a message in modern Italian and the same message duplicated in medieval Latin, which is the closest analogy I can think of, but I digress.) I would assume the Greek text is Koine, but the sources I have don't seem to specify. A. Parrot (talk) 22:39, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

It's a start.

For Ancient Greek we have 1500 BC to 300 BC. Followed by Hellenistic or Koine Greek. Alexander conquered Egypt in 332, well over a century before this stele. I really don't think Ancient Greek to be correct - and it's more like Italian vs Latin.

But I never suggested to just twist the wording: we need sources, RS, and then add the proper, sourced information.

If the Egyptians made the distinction between the "language of the gods" written in hieroglyphs, and the "language of documents" written in Demotic, I must consider that they knew the distinction between language and script. Maybe they didn't, but again, guessing is not the goal here, and the article uses the clear terms language and script, but doesn't seem to make the distinction. Not OK. And it starts right from the lead - while the infobox addresses the script, but never the language. Also not OK. Arminden (talk) 18:48, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

One can write Chinese in Cyrillic, English in Demotic - and Ancient Egyptian in Greek alphabet. To be extreme. Arminden (talk) 18:50, 17 July 2025 (UTC)