The Rosetta Stone Trivia Quiz

Answer: 4

The top register is completely missing and would almost certainly have been a winged sun disk over a group of gods.

Answer: 3

The writing on the Rosetta Stone was Greek and two forms of Egyptian - hieroglyphs and demotic. Demotic was a simplified form of writing that was used in everyday life.

It said (on the stone) that the decree should be inscribed in granite in the writing of the divine words (hieroglyphs), the writing of documents (demotic) and the writing of the Ionians (Greek) and should be set up in first, second and third rank temples.

Answer: Top row

There are three sections of text which run horizontally.
It was 76cm wide and the surviving section is 112cm high.

Answer: It was found at Rashid (or Rosetta) by French soldiers repairing a fort.

The stone was originally in an unknown temple (possibly at Sais) and was probably used as building material in a fort at one of the mouths of the Nile in the late 15th century.

Answer: None

Only about a third of the hieroglyphs have survived - there are no complete lines of hieroglyphs. The bottom right corner of the Greek text is missing as well as a small section of the top right corner of the demotic text.
To make matters worse the texts are not direct translations of each other. Demotic was the everyday language of Egypt but the spelling and grammar of Hieroglyphs had become at least partly fixed over a thousand years previously.

Answer: Ptolemy V Epiphanes

Tourists who visit Tuna el Gebel in middle Egypt often visit the tomb of Petosiris.
The text records how the king cut taxes, renounced arrears, made donations to the gods, defeated rebels, removed the requirement for priests to visit Alexandria every year, gave amnesty to prisoners and some rebels (others were impaled on stakes). It also describes arrangements for festivals and in general says what a great ruler he was.

Answer: 27 March 196 BCE

It gives the date as 'Year 9, Xandikos, day 4 which corresponds to the Egyptian month Mekhir day 18'.

Answer: An obelisk from Philae

The small obelisk, which has a bilingual inscription, is now at Kingston Lacy, a stately home in Dorset, England.

Answer: An Egyptian priest who wrote a book on hieroglyphs.

He accurately described the meaning of several hieroglyphs but his explanation of why they used a particular symbol to represent a meaning was a major source of the belief that hieroglyphs were a strange mystical system which would be more easily translated by a new age guru than a logical scientist.

Answer: Yuri Knorosov

Yuri Knorosov was a major pioneer in the decipherment of hieroglyphs but they were Mayan not Egyptian.
Among other significant work Adolf Erman (1854 to 1937) discovered a new grammatical tense that had eluded all earlier scholars.
Charles Goodwin was a pioneer in the translation of hieratic - Egyptians started with hieroglyphs then developed a simplified form called hieratic. Demotic is even more simplified and finally they developed Coptic, which is in the Greek alphabet with a few extra symbols.
Johan David Akerblad did the first work on demotic but did not take it very far.