I just finished reading 1984 and realized that the Rosetta Stone may have been created to preserve known history.
It had never occurred to me that an entire language and it’s nuances are necessary to maintain historic integrity. We may have been able to decipher hieroglyphs without a translator, but could we do it with precision enough to learn anything truthful. Can we do that now is a thoughtful question as well i guess.
I’m certain this is not an original thought, and only want to talk about the book. I think i heard somewhere that the stone was created for trade purposes as well.
Nothing quite so explicit as that I think, though obviously preserving something is always the intent when carving shit into stone.
Ptolemaic Egypt was a culture populated by Greek and Egyptian speakers. Of those who were literate, many would only be able to read Demotic or Greek, but meanwhile there is a 2500 year history (at THAT time. Egypt is ridiculously old) of Hieroglyphics being the “official” way to write things down, and the scribal and priestly classes would be part of the cultural elites. Combine that with the Ptolemies attempting to situate themselves as both continuing Alexander’s legacy and being fully Egyptian, and there will be a place for all three scripts. Engraving laws onto stones and placing them in prominent public spaces would have been a pretty common way to “publish” them in a way that’s meant to be durable and secure. See the Code of Hammurabi and Draco’s code for just a couple of examples.
The fact that Alexandria was cosmopolitan and had a sophisticated regime ruled by elites who were foreign but invested in the local traditions created a situation where this was done often enough for some to survive, several in fact, although the Rosetta Stone was the first found/identified.
I guess hieroglyphics were to the priesthood of the time what Latin is to the Catholic church today. A dead language that you artificially keep alive in order to situate yourself in some sort of historical legacy.
Seems like it was pretty analogous, though it seems like there was a ritual value to hieroglyphics and the older forms of the language that’s a few steps beyond even what ecclesiastical Latin is today. I would say there would be a certain sense that something could only have top-tier religious import if it was set down in Medut Netjeru (“the Words of the Gods”). I thought this article by an Egyptologist was pretty interesting.