It may be somewhat of a cliche, but I believe that the most important discovery from Egypt that we talked about this semester is the Rosetta Stone. Without the discovery of the Rosetta Stone there is no way of knowing if we would be able to understand much of the Demotic language that the Egyptians used, and there is very little chance that we would be able to understand any of the Hieroglyphic text that adorns the many temples and tombs throughout Egypt. Not to mention the Hieroglyphic text on the countless other artifacts discovered through research and excavation of Archaeological sites in Egypt. Anyone that is interested in Egypt should be extremely thankful that the Rosetta Stone was found. The scientific community would have much less knowledge about ancient Egypt without the translated Hieroglyphic and Demotic texts. For the most part, the only reason we can use the Rosetta Stone to decipher the two texts is because of the ancient Greek text on the bottom portion of the stele. Which means that the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great not only helped the Egyptians at the time by freeing them from the Persians, but is also helping us today because he brought Greek/Hellenistic influences with him indirectly causing the need of a multi-lingual stele like the Rosetta Stone to be made. So maybe this should actually be about Alexander the Great instead….

The Greek text on the bottom portion of the Rosetta Stone provided a starting point for researchers to work on translating the Demotic and Hieroglyphic texts. Ancient Greek was still a well known and understood language to scholars when the Rosetta Stone was found in 1799, although they struggled with understanding some of the religious and administrative language used in the Greek text since this was before a large amount of Greek papyrus texts had been discovered. When the Rosetta Stone was discovered, Demotic was a very little-known text script. When researchers working on Demotic discovered that the text in the center portion of the Rosetta Stone was the same language they were studying, they got to work on trying to translate it. They were originally only able to identify a few names by comparing the Demotic text to the Greek text. Later studies of the Rosetta Stone worked off of this small amount of translation, and after a few decades of work the first Egyptian grammar and hieroglyphic dictionary was produced. All thanks to the Rosetta Stone.