The Rosetta Stone is a very ancient and enormous slab of stone where a drecree was inscribed in Ancient Egyptian, hieroglyphs and demotic characters, as well as Ancient Greek, during the reign of the Ptolemies, the kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty, specifically, Ptolemy V, who came into the throne after some serious unrest and revolt in Egypt at the time. The stone dates from around 196 - 197 B.C and through a lot of study and difficulty, scholars were finally able to tell that the characters inscribed in the stone were a decree and that it was the first text written in a bilingual format. In this particular excerpt presented regarding The Rosetta Stone, what can be summarized is this: Through the use of language learning techniques, scientists and scholars have been attempting to understand ancient Egyptian writing. The closest they ever came to their goal, was when in the 9th century Coptic, the language that replaced ancient Egyptian, was used as an interpretation model. However, the advances made were lost when Arabic replaced Coptic in the 11th century. To this day, Western scholars and researchers are still trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, as their earlier theories about these being pictograms used to express ideas, were found to be erroneous.
