While going through the news, I came across a comment under a post about the Rosetta Stone: supposedly it is the worst copy of its own decree, half the text on it is lost, and the full hieroglyphic version is sitting somewhere in a Cairo museum under the name “the Nubayrah Stele.” A sharp claim—but it grabs you precisely because part of it is verifiable, and part of it does not survive verification.
The verifiable half turned out to be painfully accurate. The hieroglyphic section of the famous stone really has come down to us as a fragment: only the final fourteen lines of the original text survive, all of them broken off on the right, and twelve of them on the left as well. Half the sacred script simply vanished along with the upper part of the slab—along with that finished image of the king making an offering to the gods which was meant to crown the monument.
The second half of the comment, the bit about a “complete copy,” does not hold up: the Nubayrah Stele is mutilated too. So is the one found on the wall of the temple at Philae. So is the Damanhur copy. No complete version of this decree exists anywhere—not in London, not in Cairo, not in any third place. For three hundred years, Egyptology has been working with a text that survives complete on no single stone, and doing so successfully.
The hook leads not into museum studies, but into the workings of science itself: how do you reconstruct a language nobody had read for fourteen centuries if your only key to it is broken in half? The answer turned out to be engineering, not philology.
The Rosetta Stone is a shard. Granodiorite, 112.3 centimeters high, 75.7 wide, 28.4 thick, roughly 760 kilograms. The original stele, calculations based on surviving parallels suggest, stood as high as 149 centimeters and had a rounded top—a hint of it remains even in the text itself: among the hieroglyphs is the sign meaning “stele.”
The condition of the three registers varies sharply. The lower one, Greek, suffered least: fifty-four lines, the first twenty-seven preserved in full, after which the text degrades diagonally—the way the break runs across the lower right corner. The middle one, Demotic, survived even better: thirty-two lines, with light damage on the right in the first fourteen. The upper one, hieroglyphic, is almost entirely wiped away.
The full scale of the loss is reconstructed from comparable monuments. The Decree of Canopus, erected in 238 BC under Ptolemy III, is roughly one and a half times taller than the presumed original height of the Rosetta Stone—2190 against 1490 millimeters—and contains 36 lines of hieroglyphs, 73 of Demotic, and 74 of Greek. The texts are comparable in length, so the missing section of the Rosetta Stone is estimated at fourteen to fifteen lines of hieroglyphs at the top, or another roughly 300 millimeters of height. The stone in the museum is a little less than half of what was carved in 196 BC.
How the slab became construction rubble is clear from the chain of reuse. The last known hieroglyphic inscription is dated August 24, 394—the “Graffito of Esmet-Akhom” on a wall at the temple of Philae. By then, temples were being shut down: Theodosius I’s edict around 392 ended all non-Christian cults. Then the temples became quarries. The stele ended up in the foundations of a fortress built by the Mamluk sultan Qaitbay in the Nile Delta sometime between 1416 and 1496, and lay there for another three centuries, until the French began dismantling the walls of Fort Julien in July 1799 to expand its fortifications. Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard noticed the inscribed slab uncovered by the soldiers; he and Colonel d’Hautpoul immediately recognized the importance of the find and reported it to General Menou.
The document itself is usually described dryly: “a decree of priests confirming the cult of Ptolemy V.” Behind that wording lies a rather juicy story.
Ptolemy V ascended the throne at five—after his parents were killed in a conspiracy involving Ptolemy IV’s mistress, Agathoclea. Two years later, a revolt led by the general Tlepolemus broke out, and Agathoclea and her family were torn apart by a mob in Alexandria. By the time of the decree, the regent was Aristomenes of Alyzia. Meanwhile, in the south, the Great Theban Revolt had been running for two decades—from 206 to 186 BC, first under Horwennefer, then under his successor Ankhwennefer. In the east and north, the Ptolemies were losing territory: defeat at Panium in 198 handed Coele-Syria and Judea to the Seleucids, while Philip V took bites out of islands in Caria and Thrace.
So this document is the main press release of Hellenistic Egypt. The priests gathered in Memphis and recorded: the king cut taxes for soldiers and the people, pardoned prisoners, banned forced conscription, lavishly endowed the temples with silver and grain, rebuilt sanctuaries. Plus a royal-cult program: in every temple, a statue of Ptolemy “in the most conspicuous place”; priests are to tend it three times a day just as they tend the statues of the gods; two festivals a year are to be observed across Egypt, with another two every month. And, characteristically for the age, ordinary people were permitted to keep a golden shrine containing an image of the king in their homes and observe the same festivals.
The decree’s final clause is an instruction: carve the text in three scripts on stone and set up these stelae in every temple in the country.
The print run turned out to be extensive. The British Museum counts 29 Ptolemaic decrees on stone found in Egypt since 1799, 22 of which remain in Egypt. For the Memphis decree itself, ten securely dated copies are known: two carved on the walls of the temple at Philae, from years 19 and 21 of Ptolemy V’s reign; the last, a stele from Asfunis, from year 23. Some copies date to the reign of Ptolemy IV, around 218 BC, and to three earlier decrees—the Alexandrian decree of 243, the Canopus decree of 238, and another Memphis decree.
And here comes the most unpleasant part for anyone imagining the decree as a unique text. According to the British Museum, the inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a partial copy of a prototype composed roughly a century earlier, in the 3rd century BC. In certain paragraphs, only the dates and names changed. Eighteen centuries later, this genre would be called a mailing template, but the point is the same: the document was made for copying from the start.
There is a second thread usually missed. The Demotic text—that “popular” cursive script—may, researchers believe, have been the draft of the decree: a phrase about an altar for the king’s statue makes coherent sense precisely in Demotic; the Greek version does not add up at that point, while the hieroglyphic one lacks a determinative. The hieroglyphic section, meanwhile, is written not in the language current in the 2nd century, but in deliberately archaizing “Neo-Middle Egyptian”—an overt stylization after an ancient model, characteristic of ritual texts. The three versions of the same decree diverge so radically that no English translation can, in principle, serve as the standard for all three at once: the discrepancies extend even to dates. The Greek and hieroglyphic versions place the anniversary of the coronation on November 27, 197 BC; the Demotic puts it in March, next to the date of issue—March 27, 196 BC.
After the 1799 discovery, other copies of the same decree began to surface, and this is where the comment from the digest finds confirmation—but not where one expects.
The upper part of the decree, the lost portion itself, was reconstructed from parallel versions. The wall of the temple at Philae bearing a partial copy had been known since 1848, but it was obscured by reliefs and damaged. The Nubayrah Stele—limestone, 1.27 meters high, 0.51 wide, with a rounded top, now in the Egyptian Museum under inventory number 5576—is named after the town of Nubayrah on the former Canopic branch of the Nile, southwest of Damanhur. Its hieroglyphic text was published by Urbain Bouriant in 1885 in the Parisian Recueil de travaux. English Wikipedia calls it outright: “a mutilated copy.”
The main source for reconstruction was another find—a copy of the decree from Damanhur, ancient Hermopolis Magna, discovered in 1896. It is from this copy, reference works note, that most of the damaged and lost passages in the Rosetta Stone’s hieroglyphic section are restored. The copy is later than the original and therefore contains a slightly different text—with references that had already lost their meaning by the time it was carved.
The structure of the standard translation itself is revealing. The title of E. A. Wallis Budge’s translation of the hieroglyphic text, included in his 1905 guide to the Nile, reads: “translation of the hieroglyphic text of the decree of the priests of Memphis, as found upon the Rosetta Stone and the stele of Damanhur.” In other words, even the classic text cited by textbooks is assembled from two stones. Neither one, by itself, gives the full picture.
That leads to a conclusion that sounds heretical when applied to a museum artifact: the Rosetta Stone is not the best copy of the decree. The British Museum puts it condescendingly and accurately—the stele “is thought to be the most complete surviving example” because it alone preserves the inscription in three scripts and two languages at once. In hieroglyphs, it is not the standard. In Greek, it is decent. In Demotic, good. It is not complete in any of its three registers.
Now the second half of the question: how could anyone read a language whose key was broken?
Hieroglyphs fell out of use in the 4th century. The last known inscription is dated August 24, 394, on a wall at Philae, the “Graffito of Esmet-Akhom”; the last Demotic text is from 452, also from there. After that, the knowledge died completely. In the 5th century, the priest Horapollo wrote the Hieroglyphica—an explanation of nearly two hundred signs, authoritative and yet largely false, which obstructed the decipherment for another millennium and a half. In the 9th–10th centuries, the Arab historians Dhu al-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya compared the signs with Coptic—the sole descendant of ancient Egyptian speech—but without result. In the 17th century, Athanasius Kircher called the problem “the riddle of the Sphinx.”
1799 provided material, but not a solution. By June or July, it had become clear that the three inscriptions were one text; this was reported on July 19 to the recently established Institut d’Égypte. In 1800, a commission devised a way to make copies: the artist and inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté used the slab itself as a printing plate. Jean-Joseph Marcel was the first to understand that the middle text was not Syriac, but Demotic.
Then came almost a quarter-century of trial and error. A complete translation of the Greek portion appeared in 1803, and from that point the text was understood—but no more than that: everyone could read Greek; nobody could read hieroglyphs. In that same year, Richard Porson at Cambridge reconstructed the missing lower-right corner of the Greek text—a purely textual-critical method, without a single hieroglyph. The key turning points line up like this: in 1802, it was established that Demotic used phonetic signs for foreign names; in 1814, that hieroglyphic writing did the same and was noticeably connected to Demotic; between 1822 and 1824, that phonetics worked for native Egyptian names as well.
Jean-François Champollion announced the result in Paris on September 27, 1822, and his English rival Thomas Young was in the room. The key that locked the whole construction into place was Coptic—the only branch to survive to this day. Champollion’s next step is shown in one of his manuscripts: in hieroglyphs, he wrote in French “à mon ami Dubois”—“to my friend Dubois”—and that was no longer reading an inscription, but writing with dead signs.
It is worth noting what popular retellings usually leave out. The simple fact of “three languages on one stone” had been known since 1799. It did not solve the problem. The solution came through twenty-three years of stubborn work on what these signs actually meant, and none of the copies of the decree found later was needed for the decisive breakthrough—they were needed afterward, to read what would not fit on the key.
There is a blunt and uncomfortable answer to why the whole world knows this particular fragment. The British Museum states it plainly: the name “Rosetta Stone” went to the first stele found with this text. Neither quality, nor completeness, nor priority in decipherment had anything to do with it.
Its priority was chronological. The slab was found on July 15, 1799, during the dismantling of a wall at Fort Julien, and by September the occupation authorities’ official newspaper, Courrier de l'Égypte, had run a note in which the reporter expressed hope that the stone would one day become the key to hieroglyphs. The hope came true.
Then begins a story in which antiquarian collecting behaves like trophy-taking. After the capitulation of Alexandria in 1801, the French and British clashed over the fate of the scientific collections. The French scholar Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire declared that the French would rather burn all their discoveries than surrender them—a direct allusion to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. William Hamilton wrote home: “We have found among them a great deal more than has been represented or imagined.” Menou tried to register the stone as his private property; Colonel Turner later claimed that he had personally seized it and carried it away atop a pair of guns; Edward Clarke told it differently—that the stone was found beneath carpets among Menou’s baggage, in dark alleys behind his residence. The dispute over exactly how the slab changed hands remains unresolved to this day.
In February 1802, the stone arrived in Portsmouth aboard the captured frigate Egyptienne, and that same year, by order of George III, it entered the British Museum, where it has been displayed almost continuously since June 1802 under number EA 24. It is the museum’s most visited single exhibit, and for decades a photograph of it alone was a postcard bestseller.
It left the building exactly once—for one month in October 1972, to the Louvre, for the centenary of Champollion’s letter. And in 1917, when London was being bombed, the slab was hidden for two years fifteen meters underground, in a station of the Post Office Railway near Holborn. In 1999, it was cleaned directly in the gallery, stripping off the white chalk used to highlight the inscriptions for readability and a layer of carnauba wax applied so visitors’ fingers would not wear down the stone. The wax gave the slab a dark hue, which was why it was thought to be black basalt for more than a century; after cleaning, the original dark-gray granodiorite emerged, threaded with pink. The stone came from a small quarry near Gebel Tingar, west of Aswan.
The Nubayrah Stele has all this time remained listed in the Egyptian Museum under number 5576. It was published earlier—in 1885—but it has no presence in popular culture whatsoever. The difference between the two copies of one document is not the text, incomplete in both cases, but who found them, when, and who got to keep them.
The hook’s question—whether the Rosetta Stone really is the worst copy of its own decree—has a precise answer. In hieroglyphs: yes, substantially so, because half the section is missing, while the standard for restoring it lies in another city and was found almost a century later. In overall completeness: no, it remains the fullest of all those that survive, precisely because it preserves all three scripts at once. But the “complete version on the Nubayrah Stele” is amusing: it exists neither there nor anywhere else. The only way to read the decree in full is to assemble it from several damaged copies, and Egyptologists have been doing that since the 19th century, without considering it anything unusual. A language that died for four hundred years was read not from a standard text, but from several broken mirrors at once.