I hit up the British Museum a couple of weekends ago and saw the actual Rosetta Stone. This is one great thing about British museums….they’re FREE!!! Yes, you can donate money and you should…and you should recycle and give to charity and all that too….
For those of you in the dark or those who only know the Rosetta Stone as a piece of software to help you learn French (Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?):
Ptolemaic era stele written with the same passage of writing in two Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and demotic) and in classical Greek. It was created in 196 BC, discovered by the French in 1799 at Rosetta, a harbor on the Mediterranean coast in Egypt, and translated in 1822 by Frenchman Jean-François Champollion. Comparative translation of the stone assisted in understanding many previously undecipherable examples of hieroglyphic writing.
Now there are a couple of cool things about the Rosetta stone:
1. It was used to translate a ton of undeciperable artifacts that were a mystery for hundreds of years.
2. It is surrounded by a swarm 4,873 tourists, all snapping pictures for their fugly siblings back home.
3. It is available for close viewing without paying a pence.
My rule with museums is “2 hours”. You shouldn’t really spend more than that amount of time in a museum because museums get boring after about an hour. I’m into art like the next bloke, but I can only look at so many religious paintings or statues of Venus before they start to blur and I start wishing they could move and shoot spiderwebs out of their wrists, all with THX Surround Sound.
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