Rosetta Stone - The Conclusion

I have handed in my Overview of a Rosetta Stone site to Peter Robinson, which officially signals the end of my time in CMRS 401.3.

I enjoyed attending the class and learning about the Digital Humanities and how they have developed.  But if there is something I am most grateful for in this class, it was my decision to do a study on the Rosetta Stone.  I enjoyed searching for information on the Rosetta Stone in order to formally present it, and I learnt about its different depictions in the digital world, both in regards to strengths and weaknesses.  More importantly, I learnt so much about the Rosetta Stone itself, and truly appreciate the time I took to look into its background.

As such, I am happy with my decision to have made my final project an overview of the site I would like to make of the Rosetta Stone if I were ever given the chance to do so, so that others would be given the chance to learn more about the Rosetta Stone, as I did. 

I hope I may find myself in more classes with my fellow students in the future.

Good luck on your Final Exams - both those who have yet to write or are in the process of writing. 

To those who are done Final Exams and about to finish and hand in their projects, have a Happy Holiday!

Greystone Communications - Rosetta Stone Documentary

A recent documentary video made by National Geographic regarding the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone.  I have not made a full viewing of the video myself yet, but I have a good feeling that it could be a good material source addition for my site idea.

 

 

EDIT: As it turns out, it may not have been a National Geographic produced documentary, as I did some digging and found it was actually of Greystone Communications Inc. in 1996. Thank goodness I decided to check a fuller version for the credits.

Rosetta Stone - Translation Links

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/rosetta-stone-translation.asp




http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/trs/trs07.htm




http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/articles/r/the_rosetta_stone_translation.aspx








The above links are three translations of the languages of the Rosetta Stone.  The fact that they are found on different sites - each one translating a different language - is quite telling.  This shows the need for a proper site that compiles translations of all three languages into one site.








Below is an audio translation of the Rosetta Stone:

A Digital Presentation I Would Like to Make - The Rosetta Stone and Hieroglyphs

In hindsight, I suppose the various blogs I made commenting briefly about the sites I made use of for my presentation of the Rosetta Stone were leading up to this decision.

While a number of the sites I looked at did present general information about the Rosetta Stone, that is about it.  They rarely go into the Rosetta Stone's history and cultural significance, and primarily focus on its discovery and its use in the deciphering of Hieroglyphs.  

What does the text on the Rosetta Stone say about the time it was written in?  What is its current cultural significance?  How did the Egyptian language become lost?  What does the Rosetta Stone's successful deciphering tell us about Egyptian Hieroglyphs?

These are a number of questions that a number of the sites I looked into passed over.

Of the sites I looked at, How Stuff Work's "How the Rosetta Stone Works" was the most thorough in the information it presented on its subject, explaining its history and even the political significance of the Rosetta Stone.

However, I believe it could be done better.

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs - Rosetta Stone

http://www.artyfactory.com/egyptian_art/egyptian_hieroglyphs/rosetta_stone.htm

A sub-section of the Arty Factory website, the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs is essentially dedicated to teach you how to draw Egyptian art.  Part of the site is dedicated to discussing the Rosetta Stone, but the description is brief and neglects the information about Thomas Young, and the method by which Champollion came to decipher the Rosetta Stone and the Egyptian language.

Nevertheless, the site does give useful information on the Hieroglyphic alphabet, such as which hieroglyphs correlate to which sounds and letters of the English alphabet and how they are used.  However, it is mainly for fun and for translating English words into hieroglyphic form, not into the actual Egyptian language.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Rosetta Stone

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/509988/Rosetta-Stone

In the Encyclopedia Britannica entry for the Rosetta Stone, focus is given to the Rosetta Stone's decipherment, with a brief physical description, describing where it was found and by whom, and a brief summarization of the contents of the Rosetta Stone.

The site does a good job of giving credit to both Thomas Young and Jean Champollion, and describes in detail their discoveries of what Hieroglyphs were, what they meant, and how they were to be read.

For example, Thomas Young determined through studying the direction that the hieroglyphs faced that they are commonly written and read right to left, and Jean Champollion discovered that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were a translation from the Greek text, not the other way around.

About - What is the Rosetta Stone?

http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/egypt/p/rosettastone.htm

The above hyperlink goes to the site About, a general information site that discusses topics such as Arts and Literature, History, Science, as well as resources for students.  The page dedicated to the Rosetta stone gives general information about the artifact, describing what it is, where it was discovered, its location, the languages on it, and how it was deciphered.  It also discusses the contents that are to be found on the Rosetta Stone, which is a decree affirming the cult of the then-current Pharaoh of Egypt, Ptolemy V, and names the honours bestowed upon him.

However, the page is not without its flaws.  Namely, it attributes the majority of the credit to Jean Champollion, while claiming that the discovery made by Thomas Young was done by scholars in general.  More significantly, it only mentions that the key Champollion found to deciphering the Rosetta stone was in his 'Lettre à M. Dacier' published in 1822, and does not elaborate on the subject further than that.

As a result, one would have to look to another site or source in order to learn what the key Champollion used was.

Rosetta Stone - Online Language Learner

http://www.rosettastone.com/buynow?redir=http://www.rosettastone.ca/

As the Rosetta stone was used as a template to help us decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Rosetta Stone software company offers the possibility of being able to learn languages with an online app.  Rather than teaching people the language through the use of flash cards, translations, tapes or books (methods of language learning they tell you to forget), they prefer to teach language through "Dynamic Immersion", a step-by-step process of associating words with visual language.

But I can perceive easy problems with this method of learning.  The structure of other languages, the tenses they utilize, and the cases of words can differ drastically (I know this from learning Latin), and I believe it would be more efficient to learn such structures of the language through study of the language in a book and through translations. 

After all, knowing the structure of sentences can be very important when translating from one language to another, as sentences do not have similar structures across the languages. 

British Museum - Ancient Egypt Writing

http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html

The above hyperlink leads to a site linked to the British Museum describing the Rosetta Stone.  The various points about the Rosetta Stone are divided into sections by questions asked about it.  The answers given are short but to the point, explaining what it is, its origins, why it is written in three different languages, and its general history.

Unfortunately, because the answers are so short that they do miss a number of details.  As an example, while they do explain that the Rosetta Stone was found in a town called Rashid (Rosetta, hence its name), and while it does explain he knew both Greek and Coptic, which helped him to decipher the manuscripts, it neglected to mention, unlike the video in my earlier blog, that Champollion also used the Philae Obelisk as a means to assist him in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

So while the site does give straight-forward answers, the information is limited, and looking for sites with more in-depth analysis and description of both the history of the Rosetta Stone and of Champollion would be recommended.

Jean Champollion and The Rosetta Stone

The above is a National Geographics clip discussing how Jean Champollion, the man who transliterated the Egyptian hieroglyphs, was able to decipher it.  The video briefly describes what languages are on the stone, and what was written upon it - commemorating the coronation of Ptolemy V (Ptolemes in Greek) in 196 BCE, and the later half discusses how the Philae obelisk was used to help decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs through comparisons of the symbols in the names Ptolemy, and Cleopatra.  This led to the realization that, while some hieroglyphs were ideograms and pictograms, the hieroglyphs essentially represented letters and syllables.

The clip, which is part of a larger documentary, outlines the significance behind the Rosetta Stone in the study of Egyptian culture, and how it was significant in helping archaeologists to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs that had previously eluded scholars.