The Rosetta Stone is, at first glance, the least exciting thing in the British Museum. It is a slab of dark stone, taller than a child, broken at the corners, covered top to bottom in writing you cannot read. Most children walk straight past it on their way to the mummies. But it is one of the most important objects anyone has ever dug out of the ground, and once your child knows why, they will not walk past it again.
Three messages on one stone
Here is the whole thing in a sentence: the same message is written on the stone three times, in three different kinds of writing. Show your child the three bands from top to bottom. At the top are Egyptian hieroglyphs, the little pictures. In the middle is a curlier Egyptian writing called Demotic. At the bottom is Ancient Greek. Same words, three ways.
The writing nobody could read
For more than a thousand years, nobody on Earth could read hieroglyphs. The knowledge had been lost, the way a password gets lost. All those beautiful little pictures carved across temples and tombs, and not one person left alive who knew what they meant. Ask your child to picture that: a whole language, right there in front of everyone, and no one able to read a word of it.
The stone was the key
This is where it gets good, because it is a puzzle with a trick in it. People could still read Ancient Greek. And the Greek at the bottom of the stone said the same thing as the mysterious pictures at the top. So if you already know what the message says in a language you can read, you can slowly work out the language you cannot. That is exactly how it was done. It took twenty years and a stubborn young man named Champollion, but the stone was the key that opened the door back into Ancient Egypt.
A story to tell them
A long time ago, soldiers digging in the hot sand of Egypt struck something hard. It was a huge broken stone, covered in three kinds of writing, and one of them was a language that nobody in the whole world could read any more. Clever people puzzled over that stone for twenty years, comparing the writing they knew with the writing they did not, a little at a time, like the longest, slowest game of guess-the-code ever played. Then one day a young man named Champollion looked at it and suddenly understood, and for the first time in over a thousand years, someone could read the picture-writing of the ancient Egyptians again. One broken stone gave us back a whole lost world.
Make your own, at home
You do not need to be in London for this one, and it might be the best part. Make your own Rosetta Stone at the kitchen table. Have your child invent a secret alphabet, their own set of symbols, and write a short message in it. Then write the same message underneath in ordinary letters, so it can be cracked. Swap with someone and break each other's codes. In ten minutes they will understand exactly what the stone is, because they will have made one.
The Rosetta Stone is one of the stops in our British Museum hunt, and it sits close to the heart of what we do. Every one of our booklets ends with a secret codeword to crack, which is really just a small, friendly Rosetta Stone of its own. If a trip to London is coming up, the hunt carries your child from this stone to the mummies and the rest of the museum's treasures, with a mission at every stop. And if London is a long way off, an afternoon of making and breaking codes at home is closer to the real thing than it sounds.
Federica, The Gentle Parent
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