r/history • u/AugustWolf22 • Feb 02 '23
Battle site of 'Great Revolt' recorded on Rosetta Stone unearthed in Egypt Article
https://www.livescience.com/rosetta-stone-ancient-egyptian-battle-site180
u/CPNZ Feb 03 '23
Interestingly "the" Rosetta Stone was only one of many copies - "According to the inscription on the Stone, an identical copy of the declaration was to be placed in every sizeable temple across Egypt. Whether this happened is unknown, but copies of the same bilingual, three-script decree have now been found and can be seen in other museums. The Rosetta Stone is thus one of many mass-produced stelae designed to widely disseminate an agreement issued by a council of priests in 196 BC. In fact, the text on the Stone is a copy of a prototype that was composed about a century earlier in the 3rd century BC. Only the date and the names were changed!" https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-know-about-rosetta-stone
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u/steveosek Feb 03 '23 edited Feb 03 '23
Their existence makes sense given historical context. Egypt, particularly Alexandria, was mutli-cultural as hell eventually, with people from all over the region being in it. Lots of trade, so putting these stones out is the modern day equivalent of cities that get a lot of international travelers having signs in multiple languages.
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u/gingersaurus82 Feb 03 '23
I don't think it was for the foreigners. The Rosetta stone is written in Greek, the language of the ruling elite; and ancient Egyptian, the language of the local masses. The Egyptian is further written in both hyroglyphics, the religious script for priests, since it was posted at and the text concerned temple taxes; and demotic, the common script, used in daily life for record keeping, letters, etc.
Any foreigner happening upon it would have to be able to both speak and write one of these two languages.
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u/XanderTheMander Feb 03 '23
It's more like how California has tons of things in Spanish and English.
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u/Devil-sAdvocate Feb 03 '23
Any foreigner happening upon it would have to be able to both speak and write one of these two languages.
Only literate ones, and only those literate ones who knew one of those languages.
Scholars have estimated that at the high point of Greek civilization, fewer than one-third of the adult population could read or write. Even so, literacy was more widespread in the Greco-Roman world than it was in many other ancient civilizations, where the ability to read or write was limited to a small number of priests or scribes.
Very few people were literate in Egypt- almost all of them officials of state. Estimates are as low as 1% of the population as being literate in Egypt and up to 5% being the high end of the estimate.
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u/steveosek Feb 04 '23
Very true. Also wasn't Greek pretty much the universal language of the time for writing? Like didn't even the Romans write in Greek a lot too?
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u/Devil-sAdvocate Feb 04 '23 edited Feb 04 '23
After Rome conquered Greece (~175 BC) they took a bunch of educated Greeks as slaves to do administration duties/scribes.
Then after the empire split, The Eastern Roman Empire mostly used Greek while the Western mostly used Latin.
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u/jagerwick Feb 03 '23
Does it mention where they buried the gate?
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u/The13thAllitnilClone Feb 03 '23
It's not there any more, the Americans nicked it over a century ago
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u/Proxy-Pie Feb 03 '23
I always wanted to know more about this event, it's not mentioned a lot.
For anyone who's interested, I found an old article I read with more details about the revolt: https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/files/TheGreatRevoltoftheEgyptians.pdf
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u/drmcsinister Feb 03 '23
Within the kiln complex, archaeologists were surprised to find the remains of a man inside a kiln with his legs sticking out.
That's crazy. So not only did a ton of people die, but the area was just left in complete and total destruction. Not even corpses were moved... for centuries.
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u/BillyBlabby Feb 03 '23
It's amazing to see how that has changed the history of languages. We couldn't decipher anything from way back without this hunk of rock. I'm blown away!
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u/XGcs22 Feb 03 '23
So is the same story in the Bible known as the Exodus?
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u/groveborn Feb 03 '23 edited Feb 03 '23
No. Exodus has no archaeological evidence at all. Not even the existence of Hebrew people within the nation living in slavery.
No pottery, nothing at all. No way for a million people to pour out of a busy nation in a few days and find nothing. It appears as though it was an adaptation of a Persian story. Same general theme, made for the Hebrew people after the fall of Israel during the Persian invasion. The religion was very different at that time.
This is during the Greek occupation, not the pharo rule. Thousands of years after they ruled.
Still super interesting, though.
Edit: it could be Babylon. π€·
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u/henkiedepenkie Feb 03 '23
i thought it was an adaptation of the Babylonian exile, in a way not to upset their Persian overlords.
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u/smolDreee Feb 03 '23
This discovery is from a more recent point in history, so this neither confirms or denies anything found in the biblical book of Exodus.
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u/Shyriath Feb 03 '23
The Torah, including the Book of Exodus, was very probably already compiled into its final form by this time, so it's not likely.
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u/AugustWolf22 Feb 02 '23
Thought this was quite an interesting article and knew that it'd be a good idea to share it here. Whilst I'd judge that the title of the Article's use of the Rosetta stone is a clickbait gimmick, to get eyeballs and clicks, the article itself is still decent and interesting, so worth a read. I didn't the previously know that there was a major revolt during the Ptolomaic dynasty.