rly portion of this chapter is selected, by kind
permission of Dr. Henry Smith Williams, from his "History
of the Art of Writing," Copyright, 1902 and 1903.

_The Rosetta Stone: The Discoveries of Dr. Thomas Young: The
Classification of the Egyptian Alphabet by Champollion: Egyptian
Love-songs and the Book of the Dead_

Conspicuously placed in the great hall of Egyptian antiquities, in the
British Museum, is a wonderful piece of sculpture known as the Rosetta
Stone. A glance at its graven surface suffices to show that three sets
of inscriptions are recorded there. The upper one, occupying about
one-fourth of the surface, is a pictured scroll, made up of chains of
those strange outlines of serpents, hawks, lions, and so on, which are
recognised, even by the least initiated, as hieroglyphics. The middle
inscription, made up of lines, angles, and half-pictures, one might
suppose to be a sort of abbreviated or shorthand hieroglyphic. The
third, or lower, inscription, is manifestly Greek, obviously a thing of
words. If the screeds above be also made of words, only the elect have
any way of proving the fact.

Fortunately, however, even the least scholarly observer is left in
no doubt as to the real import of the thing he sees, for an obliging
English label tells us that these three inscriptions are renderings of
the same message, and that this message is a "decree of the Priests
of Memphis conferring divine honours on Ptolemy V., Epiphanes, King
of Egypt, B.C. 195." The label goes on to state that the upper
transcription (of which, unfortunately, only parts of the last dozen
lines or so remain, the slab being broken) is in "the Egyptian language,
in hieroglyphics, or writing of the priests"; the second inscription in
the same language, "in demotic, or the writing of the people"; and the
third "in the Greek language and character."

Then comes a brief biography of the Rosetta Stone itself, as follows:
"This stone was found by the French in 1798 among the ruins of Fort St.
Julian, near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. It passed into the hands
of the British by the treaty of Alexandria, and was deposited in the
British Museum in the year 1801." There is a whole volume of history
in that brief inscription, and a bitter sting thrown in, if the reader
chance to be a Frenchman. Yet the facts involved could scarcely be
suggested more modestly. They are recorded much more bluntly in a graven
inscription on the side of th