The Rosetta Stone online: A project in cooperation of the Excellence Cluster Topoi and the Institut für Archäologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The Rosetta Stone online: A project in cooperation of the Excellence Cluster Topoi and the Institut für Archäologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The Rosetta Stone Online project

This homepage is the outcome of a hands-on university seminar on the online presentation of the Rosetta Stone. It is a cooperation of the German Excellence Cluster Topoi and the Department of Archaeology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. For this project, the project leaders and the seminar participants combined their expertise in Egyptology, Ancient Greek Linguistics, General Linguistics, and Computer Sciences. A kernel part of the homepage is a full linguistic analysis of the trilingual text on the Rosetta Stone. However, it also seeks to present interesting information for a non-academic reader. The homepage is still under development.

The Rosetta Stone

On the Rosetta Stone, an Ancient Egyptian decree from 196 BCE was inscribed in three versions, in three language varieties and scripts:

• Ptolemaic Neo-Middle Egyptian in hieroglyphic script (top section),
• Demotic Egyptian in Demotic script (middle section),
• Koine Greek language in Greek script (bottom section).

This type of artefact is called a trilingual. The Rosetta Stone played a crucial role in the famous decipherment of the hieroglyphic script by Jean-François Champollion (see the BBC documentary The Mystery of the Rosetta Stone).

• Introduction
• Example: Part XIX (= #320)
• Whole text (with IDs)
• Bibliography