Question

The Decipherment of the Rosetta Stone

In 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, French soldiers uncovering the foundations of an addition to a fort near the port city of Rashid (Rosetta) unearthed a large, dark basalt slab. This slab, which would become known as the Rosetta Stone, bore inscriptions in three distinct scripts: Greek, Demotic (the everyday script of ancient Egypt), and hieroglyphs (the formal writing system used for sacred texts). Recognizing its potential historical value, the French scholars accompanying the military expedition documented the artifact. However, following the defeat of French forces in Egypt, the stone fell into British hands under the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801 and was subsequently shipped to the British Museum in London, where it has remained on public display since 1802.

The discovery of the stone sparked an intellectual race across Europe to decode the hieroglyphs, a language that had been dead for over a millennium. The Greek text on the stone, which was easily translated, revealed that the monument was a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BCE on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The decree established the divine cult of the young king and was written in three scripts so that priests, government officials, and common literate Egyptians alike could read it. Since the three inscriptions were assumed to share identical or nearly identical content, the Greek text served as the crucial key to unlocking the other two.

Early progress was made by the English polymath Thomas Young. In 1814, Young focused his attention on the Demotic script, identifying it as a cursive form of writing rather than a collection of purely symbolic drawings. He noticed that certain groups of Demotic characters closely resembled words in the Greek text. Young also turned his attention to the hieroglyphic text and made a vital breakthrough regarding cartouches—oval loops enclosing groups of hieroglyphs. He correctly deduced that these cartouches contained the phonetic spellings of royal names, such as Ptolemy. By matching the characters within the cartouches to the known Greek pronunciation of the king's name, Young identified several phonetic signs. However, he remained bound by the prevailing belief that hieroglyphs were primarily symbolic ideograms, using phonetic spelling only for foreign names that lacked direct symbolic representations in Egyptian culture.

It was the French scholar Jean-François Champollion who would ultimately fully decipher the system. Champollion, who had studied ancient languages since childhood and was fluent in Coptic—a descendant of the ancient Egyptian language written in the Greek alphabet—approached the task with a different hypothesis. In 1821, he began analyzing a newly discovered bilingual inscription on an obelisk from Philae, which featured cartouches for both Ptolemy and Cleopatra. By comparing the signs in these cartouches, Champollion identified shared characters representing the sounds for "p," "t," "o," and "l."

The decisive moment came in September 1822. Champollion received drawings of inscriptions from the temple of Abu Simbel, which predated the Greek and Roman periods of Egyptian history. Within these older cartouches, he recognized a glyph that represented the sun (which he knew from Coptic was pronounced "ra"). He followed this with a glyph that he recognized as "mes" (meaning "to give birth" in Coptic) and two instances of the letter "s" he had previously identified. Together, these spelled "Ramses," the name of a famous pharaoh from the nineteenth dynasty. Crucially, Ramses was a native Egyptian ruler, not a foreign Ptolemaic one. This proved that the phonetic system was not just an auxiliary tool used for spelling foreign names, but an intrinsic feature of the native Egyptian language itself. Champollion famously ran into his brother's office, shouted "Je tiens mon affaire!" ("I've got it!"), and collapsed from exhaustion.

Champollion’s breakthrough relied heavily on his mastery of Coptic. Unlike his contemporaries, who viewed Coptic as an unrelated tongue, Champollion understood that Coptic grammar and vocabulary preserved the phonetics and structure of the ancient Egyptian language. This linguistic bridge allowed him to read the ancient texts as spoken language, rather than treating them merely as visual cryptograms. By the time he published his landmark work, the Lettre à M. Dacier, in late 1822, Champollion had outlined a complete system of grammar and decipherment, demonstrating that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was a complex mixture of figurative, symbolic, and phonetic signs all in the same text.

According to the passage, the British acquired possession of the Rosetta Stone as a direct result of which of the following?