On July 19, 1799 in the Egyptian town of Al-Rashid (Rosetta called by Europeans) during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, a French officer unearthed a tall granite headstone in a little over a meter wide and about 70 cm, which appeared on the shiny side an inscription in three scripts different. Thanks to it, twenty years later, Jean-Francois Champollion was able to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. The text engraved on the stele is divided into three parts: the upper part, consisting of 14 lines, written in hieroglyphics, the middle 32 lines appear in cursive writing, the demotic, which is the last phase of Egyptian writing, at the bottom 54 lines are drawn in greek, spoken and written language in Egypt since the Hellenistic period. Faced with the impossibility to decipher hieroglyphs and demotic text, both written forms of a dead language (Egyptian), the French scholars devoted themselves to the entry in greek. The translation revealed that it was of a decree promulgated in Memphis on the eighteenth day of the second month of the season of Peret (27 March 196 BC) by the Egyptian priests, gathered there to celebrate the first anniversary of the ascent to the throne of Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The text itself did not provide any information about historically significant, but at the end of the track offered to students that they needed. In fact, ordered the priests who make copies of the text in stone for the most important temples and was recorded both in the Egyptian language, with the "divine words of writing (hieroglyphs), and in the writing of the people (the demotic) both in the Greek language. It was therefore of the same text in three different versions. For scholars this then offered the opportunity to decipher, through a comparison with the Greek version, the two ancient writings hitherto incomprehensible.
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