Rosetta Stone
Greek text

The Greek text on the Rosetta Stone provided the starting point. Ancient Greek was widely known to scholars, but they were not familiar with details of its use in the Hellenistic period as a government language in Ptolemaic Egypt; large-scale discoveries of Greek papyri were a long way in the future. Thus, the earliest translations of the Greek text of the stone show the translators still struggling with the historical context and with administrative and religious jargon. Stephen Weston verbally presented an English translation of the Greek text at a Society of Antiquaries meeting in April 1802.

Meanwhile, two of the lithographic copies made in Egypt had reached the Institut de France in Paris in 1801. There, librarian and antiquarian Gabriel de La Porte du Theil set to work on a translation of the Greek, but he was dispatched elsewhere on Napoleon's orders almost immediately, and he left his unfinished work in the hands of colleague Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon. Ameilhon produced the first published translations of the Greek text in 1803, in both Latin and French to ensure that they would circulate widely. At Cambridge, Richard Porson worked on the missing lower right corner of the Greek text. He produced a skilful suggested reconstruction, which was soon being circulated by the Society of Antiquaries alongside its prints of the inscription. At almost the same moment, Christian Gottlob Heyne in Göttingen was making a new Latin translation of the Greek text that was more reliable than Ameilhon's and was first published in 1803. It was reprinted by the Society of Antiquaries in a special issue of its journal Archaeologia in 1811, alongside Weston's previously unpublished English translation, Colonel Turner's narrative, and other documents.
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