ROSETTA STONE | IAS GYAN

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Context: Many Egypt historians are demanding the U.K to return the 2,000-year-old Rosetta Stone.

Details:

The Rosetta Stone is a large stone slab with inscriptions on it and is believed to be a piece of a bigger rock.
It has inscriptions in three scripts, all of which convey a decree or public message.
The decree is inscribed three times, in hieroglyphs (suitable for a priestly decree), Demotic (the cursive Egyptian script used for daily purposes, meaning ‘language of the people’), and Ancient Greek (the language of the administration – the rulers of Egypt at this point were Greco-Macedonian after Alexander the Great’s conquest).
This is similar to how in Ancient India, King Ashoka ordered stambhas or edicts that had messages of Buddha’s teachings and news about victory in a war inscribed. These were then placed throughout the kingdom for the public to see.
Its discovery that helped develop the specific field of ancient Egypt studies, Egyptology.
According to the British Museum, the engraving was done during the reign of King Ptolemy V who ruled from 204–181 BC.
This stone was ‘rediscovered’ in the time of French king Napoleon Bonaparte, who launched a campaign in Egypt from 1798 to 1801.
On Napoleon’s defeat later at the hands of the British, the Treaty of Alexandria (1801) led to its transfer and it has been at the British Museum since then.