Egypt Guide
The Delta
Rosetta (Rashid)
The coastal town of ROSETTA (Rashid in Arabic) has waxed and waned in counterpoint to the fortunes of Alexandria, 65km away. When Alex was moribund, Rosetta burgeoned as a port, entering its heyday after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in the sixteenth century, only to decline after Alexandria's revival. The modern-day town is still "surrounded by groves of orange and lemon trees", as English traveller Eliza Fay wrote home in 1817, but its "appearance of cleanliness ... so gratifying to the English eye" has dissipated, and these days few tourists come to wander through its run-down, littered streets in search of once-elegant Ottoman mansions.
This earlier European fascination is due to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by French soldiers in 1799. Their officer realized the significance of this second-century BC basalt slab inscribed with ancient hieroglyphs and demotic Egyptian and Greek script, which was forwarded to Napoleon's savants in Cairo. Although their archeological booty had to be surrendered in 1801 – which is how the Stone, "Alexander's Sarcophagus" and many other objects wound up in the British Museum – it was a French professor, Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), who finally deciphered the hieroglyphs by comparison with the Greek text, and unlocked the secret of the Ancient Egyptian tongue.