Posted by:
BeenThereDunnThatExMo
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Date: May 15, 2012 05:07PM
On Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt, the expeditionary army was accompanied by the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a corps of 167 technical experts (savants). On July 15, 1799, as French soldiers under the command of Colonel d'Hautpoul were strengthening the defences of Fort Julien, a couple of miles north-east of the Egyptian port city of Rashid, Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard spotted a slab with inscriptions on one side that the soldiers had uncovered. He and d'Hautpoul saw at once that it might be important and informed general Jacques-François Menou, who happened to be at Rosetta. The find was announced to Napoleon's newly founded scientific association in Cairo, the Institut d'Égypte, in a report by Commission member Michel Ange Lancret noting that it contained three inscriptions, the first in hieroglyphs and the third in Greek, and rightly suggesting that the three inscriptions would be versions of the same text. Lancret's report, dated July 19, 1799, was read to a meeting of the Institute soon after July 25. French Lieutenant Bouchard, meanwhile, transported the stone to Cairo for examination by scholars. Napoleon himself inspected what had already begun to be called la Pierre de Rosette, the Rosetta Stone, shortly before his return to France in August 1799.
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian granodiorite inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BCE on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek. Because it presents essentially the same text in all three scripts (with some minor differences between them), it provided the key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Study of the decree was already under way as the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. It was 20 years, however, before the decipherment of the Egyptian texts was announced by Jean-François Champollion in Paris in 1822; it took longer still before scholars were able to read other Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently. Major advances in the decoding were: recognition that the stone offered three versions of the same text (1799); that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names (1802); that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic (Thomas Young, 1814); and that, in addition to being used for foreign names, phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words (Champollion, 1822–1824).
Without access to the INTERNET Joseph Smith had no idea that the Rosetta Stone had even been discovered, let alone deciphered, as he was concocting his fraudulent "translation" of the Egyptian Funerary Scrolls that he purchased from Michael H. Chandler in July 1835 and created the so-called "The Book Of Abraham".
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in and of itself drives a stake through the heart of the grand notion that Joseph Smith could effectively "tanslate" anything at all.
Even if Joseph Smith had been able to get his hands on a Bazooka Bubble-Gum Magic Decoder Ring at the time...The Book of Mormon, The Book of Abraham and everything that came after that was coughed up by Joseph Smith was already "dead-in-the-water" by that time.
Or so it seems to me...
(all of the above Rosetta Stone info courtesy of Wikipedia)