Tue Mar 23, 7pm, CAS 537C (Geddes Viewing Room)
“The Mystery of the Rosetta Stone / The Secrets of the Hieroglyphs”
From “Egypt: Rediscovering a Lost World” (2005, BBC).
These episodes show how Jean-François Champollion used the Rosetta Stone to unlock the mysteries of the lost civilisation of Ancient Egypt which had been closed off to Europeans for centuries prior to the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. The stone, discovered by the French in 1799, had been created as a work of propaganda by the Greek speaking Pharaoh Ptolemy V to establish his place in Egyptian cosmology and flashbacks are included to explain this belief system.