Details

Object type

watercolour

Title

International Congress of Orientalists. Visit to the British Museum. The Rosetta Stone

Artist/Maker

William Simpson maker

Place Associated

England, London (place depicted)

Date

1874

Materials

pencil and watercolour, paper

Dimensions

unframed: 249 mm x 380 mm

Description

Watercolour depiction of a group of people gather round an exhibit in the British Museum. Pencil and wash. Signed and dated (15 September 1874). An engraving based on this sketch was printed in the Illustrated London News on Saturday 26 September 1874. "It was on Tuesday that Dr. Birch welcomed the Oriental scholars at the British Museum. We present a sketch of the scene witnessed upon this occasion in the Egyptian Saloon. Dr. Birch there showed his visitors the famous Rosetta stone, which was found at Rosetta, near the western mouth of the Nile. It is inscribed with a decree in honour of Ptolemy V. , one of the Greek or Macedonian Kings of Egypt, about 200 years before the Christian era. The sentences are written in three different alphabets, the hieroglyphic, or sacred symbolic characters; the enchoral or demotic, which was the common popular style in Egypt; and the Greek. By this means it was that Dr. Young, M. Champollion, and other scholars of the last generation, obtained a key to the meaning of the hieroglyphics of Egypt, and the whole structure of our knowledge of the ancient history of that country has been raised on this fragment of stone.". Oriental Studies is a field of study of Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, including their archaeology, language and people. Orientalism has been interpreted by Edward Said in recent times as a patronising Western attitude towards Asian, Middle Eastern and African societies.

ID Number

MLSC.778739

Location

In storage