Ancient Egypt was a dumb mystery with alll those shinlng great pyramids and sphinxes., A question also wrappped in gold. In a timelne, more tan 40 centuries separe us from the Gizaeh Pyramids. The great Sphynx was asking her questions since the dawn of History. Nalapeleon himself knew that when his addrress to his tropos in his failed campaign near Cairo and the Nile….the huge blood vesssel of Egypt .
The area called Ancient Egypt has varied over the centuries, but it is generally accepted that it ranged from the Nile Delta in the north to Elephantine at the First Cataract of the Nile in the south. It also controlled the eastern desert, the Red Sea coastline, the Sinai Peninsula, and a large western territory dominating the scattered oases. Historically, it was made up of Upper and Lower Egypt, to the south and north respectively, which preceded the creation of a unified state. In its period of greatest expansion, it controlled the Amorite kingdoms of Palestine and northern Syria, reaching as far as the middle Euphrates, and the Nubian chiefdoms of the Sudan, as far as Jebel Barkal, on the fourth cataract of the Nile. It exerted an important cultural influence among the neighboring towns, and even in regions as far away as Cyprus, the Anatolian coast and the Hellenic peninsula.
The Egyptian civilization developed for more than 3,500 years. It began with the unification of some cities in the Nile Valley, around 3200 BC. C.,3 and conventionally it is finished in the year 31 a. C., when the Roman Empire conquered and absorbed Ptolemaic Egypt, which disappeared as a state. This event did not represent the first period of foreign domination in Egypt, but it led to a gradual transformation in the political and religious life of the valley of the Nile, marking the end of the independent development of their cultural identity. This, however, had begun to gradually dissolve after the conquests of the Persians (6th century BC) and the Macedonians (4th century BC), especially during the period of the Ptolemies. The arrival of Christianity, and its spread among the native Egyptians, cut off one of the last survivals of ancient Egyptian culture. In 535, by order of Justinian I, the cult of the goddess Isis was prohibited in the temple of Philae, thus ending a religion of more than four millennia. However, the Egyptian language (called Coptic) continued to be used, written in an alphabet derived from Greek, and the native Egyptians fully identified with Christianity, especially the Monophysite doctrine. Then a Coptic literature arose, of a Christian nature, which collected myths, customs and beliefs of the ancient traditional religion. The disappearance of Coptic and its replacement by Arabic, within the framework of the Islamization of the country after its conquest, marked the definitive end of the last remains of Ancient Egypt.
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stela inscribed with a decree published in Memphis in 196 BC. C. in the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three different scripts: the upper text in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the middle part in demotic script and the lower part in ancient Greek. Because it presents essentially the same content in all three inscriptions, with minor differences between them, this stone provided the key to the modern decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The stela was carved in the Hellenistic period and is thought to have originally been on display inside a temple, possibly in nearby Sais. It was probably moved at the end of Antiquity or during the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and finally used as a building material in a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta), in the Nile delta. There it was found on July 15, 1799 by soldier Pierre-François Bouchard during the French campaign in Egypt. As the first ancient multilingual text discovered in modern times, the Rosetta Stone aroused public interest in its potential to decipher the hitherto unintelligible Egyptian hieroglyphic script, and consequently its lithographic and plaster copies began to circulate among museums. and European scholars. The British defeated the French in Egypt and the stone was transported to London after the signing of the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. It has been on public display since 1802 in the British Museum, where it is the most visited piece.
The first complete translation of the ancient Greek text appeared in 1803. In 1822, the French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion announced in Paris the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, but it would take linguists some time to read with certainty other inscriptions and texts of the ancient Greek. Ancient Egypt. The main advances in decoding were the recognition that the stele offers three versions of the same text (1799), that the demotic text uses phonetic characters to write foreign names (1802), that the hieroglyphic text also does so and has general similarities with the demotic —Thomas Young in 1814— and that, in addition to being used for foreign names, phonetic characters were also used to write native Egyptian words —Champollion between 1822 and 1824—.
Later, two fragmentary copies of the same decree were discovered, and several bilingual and trilingual Egyptian inscriptions are known today, including two Ptolemaic decrees, such as the Decree of Canopus of 238 BC. C. and the Memphis Decree of Ptolemy IV, c. 218 BC For this reason, although the Rosetta Stone is no longer unique, it was an essential reference for the current understanding of the literature and civilization of Ancient Egypt and the term "Rosetta Stone" itself is today used in other contexts as the name of the essential key to a new field of knowledge.
The Mystery warpped in linen and gold
Ancient Egypt was a dumb mystery with alll those shinlng great pyramids and sphinxes., A question also wrappped in gold. In a timelne, more tan 40 centuries separe us from the Gizaeh Pyramids. The great Sphynx was asking her questions ssince the dawn of History. Nalapeleon himself knew that when his addrress to his tropos in his failed campaign near Cairo and the Nile….the huge blood vesssel of Egypt .
The area called Ancient Egypt has varied over the centuries, but it is generally accepted that it ranged from the Nile Delta in the north to Elephantine at the First Cataract of the Nile in the south. It also controlled the eastern desert, the Red Sea coastline, the Sinai Peninsula, and a large western territory dominating the scattered oases. Historically, it was made up of Upper and Lower Egypt, to the south and north respectively, which preceded the creation of a unified state. In its period of greatest expansion, it controlled the Amorite kingdoms of Palestine and northern Syria, reaching as far as the middle Euphrates, and the Nubian chiefdoms of the Sudan, as far as Jebel Barkal, on the fourth cataract of the Nile. It exerted an important cultural influence among the neighboring towns, and even in regions as far away as Cyprus, the Anatolian coast and the Hellenic peninsula.
The Egyptian civilization developed for more than 3,500 years. It began with the unification of some cities in the Nile Valley, around 3200 BC. C.,3 and conventionally it is finished in the year 31 a. C., when the Roman Empire conquered and absorbed Ptolemaic Egypt, which disappeared as a state. This event did not represent the first period of foreign domination in Egypt, but it led to a gradual transformation in the political and religious life of the valley of the Nile, marking the end of the independent development of their cultural identity. This, however, had begun to gradually dissolve after the conquests of the Persians (6th century BC) and the Macedonians (4th century BC), especially during the period of the Ptolemies. The arrival of Christianity, and its spread among the native Egyptians, cut off one of the last survivals of ancient Egyptian culture. In 535, by order of Justinian I, the cult of the goddess Isis was prohibited in the temple of Philae, thus ending a religion of more than four millennia. However, the Egyptian language (called Coptic) continued to be used, written in an alphabet derived from Greek, and the native Egyptians fully identified with Christianity, especially the Monophysite doctrine. Then a Coptic literature arose, of a Christian nature, which collected myths, customs and beliefs of the ancient traditional religion. The disappearance of Coptic and its replacement by Arabic, within the framework of the Islamization of the country after its conquest, marked the definitive end of the last remains of Ancient Egypt.
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stela inscribed with a decree published in Memphis in 196 BC. C. in the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three different scripts: the upper text in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the middle part in demotic script and the lower part in ancient Greek. Because it presents essentially the same content in all three inscriptions, with minor differences between them, this stone provided the key to the modern decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The stela was carved in the Hellenistic period and is thought to have originally been on display inside a temple, possibly in nearby Sais. It was probably moved at the end of Antiquity or during the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and finally used as a building material in a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta), in the Nile delta. There it was found on July 15, 1799 by soldier Pierre-François Bouchard during the French campaign in Egypt. As the first ancient multilingual text discovered in modern times, the Rosetta Stone aroused public interest in its potential to decipher the hitherto unintelligible Egyptian hieroglyphic script, and consequently its lithographic and plaster copies began to circulate among museums. and European scholars. The British defeated the French in Egypt and the stone was transported to London after the signing of the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. It has been on public display since 1802 in the British Museum, where it is the most visited piece.
The first complete translation of the ancient Greek text appeared in 1803. In 1822, the French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion announced in Paris the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, but it would take linguists some time to read with certainty other inscriptions and texts of the ancient Greek. Ancient Egypt. The main advances in decoding were the recognition that the stele offers three versions of the same text (1799), that the demotic text uses phonetic characters to write foreign names (1802), that the hieroglyphic text also does so and has general similarities with the demotic —Thomas Young in 1814— and that, in addition to being used for foreign names, phonetic characters were also used to write native Egyptian words —Champollion between 1822 and 1824—.
Later, two fragmentary copies of the same decree were discovered, and several bilingual and trilingual Egyptian inscriptions are known today, including two Ptolemaic decrees, such as the Decree of Canopus of 238 BC. C. and the Memphis Decree of Ptolemy IV, c. 218 BC For this reason, although the Rosetta Stone is no longer unique, it was an essential reference for the current understanding of the literature and civilization of Ancient Egypt and the term "Rosetta Stone" itself is today used in other contexts as the name of the essential key to a new field of knowledge.
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