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The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger slab erected at an Egyptian temple in 196 B.C.E., during the reign of Ptolemy V, a Ptolemaic king of Macedonian Greek ancestry. Its surface is inscribed with a decree issued by a council of Egyptian priests on the anniversary of Ptolemy’s coronation.
Despite the stone’s later significance, the text itself is relatively mundane, listing the king’s accomplishments before reminding readers of his divinity and affirming his royal cult. The priests conclude their message by ordering that the decree be inscribed on stelae “in the writing of the words of the gods, and the writing of the books and in the writing of [the Greeks].” These copies, in turn, were distributed at temples across the kingdom.
Developed around three millennia earlier, in 3100 B.C.E., hieroglyphs are pictorial symbols used to write the ancient Egyptian language. By Ptolemy’s time, some 3,000 years after hieroglyphs’ creation, the elaborate script was mainly used by priests (hence the Rosetta Stone’s reference to “the words of the gods”), with the general public more often using the simpler Demotic.
As Ilona Regulski, a curator of Egyptian written culture at the British Museum, which has housed the Rosetta Stone since 1802, says, “Egypt was a very multicultural society at the time and those who could read and write were able to do so in more than one language. So it was quite common in that time to translate any kind of formal writing into other scripts, whether it was Egyptian to Greek or Greek to Egyptian.”
The council issued its decree in the midst of the Great Revolt (206 to 186 B.C.E.), a poorly documented uprising sparked by long-brewing tensions between the Greek Ptolemaic rulers and their Egyptian subjects. Egyptian veterans of a war spearheaded by Ptolemy V’s father “returned home unwilling to accept their role as second-class citizens and actively pushed for the return of Egyptian leadership,” per Archaeology magazine. The Rosetta Stone references these events directly, detailing how Ptolemy, who succeeded his father around 204 B.C.E., captured an enemy town, “cut to pieces the rebels who were therein”. Lavish in its praise of the young king, the decree is essentially “a propaganda poster carved in stone,” says Dolnick.