This repository contains data for recreation of a British Museum object - the Rosetta Stone - in 3D using Agisoft PhotoScan Pro. One could use the raw images with any other package that supports Photogrammetry.
Figure 1: A gif representation of the stone in 3D
A valuable key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs, the inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree passed by a council of priests. It is one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation.
In previous years the family of the Ptolemies had lost control of certain parts of the country. It had taken their armies some time to put down opposition in the Delta, and parts of southern Upper Egypt, particularly Thebes, were not yet back under the government's control.
Before the Ptolemaic era (that is before about 332 BC), decrees in hieroglyphs such as this were usually set up by the king. It shows how much things had changed from Pharaonic times that the priests, the only people who had kept the knowledge of writing hieroglyphs, were now issuing such decrees. The list of good deeds done by the king for the temples hints at the way in which the support of the priests was ensured.
The decree is inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration). The importance of this to Egyptology is immense.
Soon after the end of the fourth century AD, when hieroglyphs had gone out of use, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to decipher them.
Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.
Soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799 while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta). On Napoleon's defeat, the stone became the property of the British under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria (1801) along with other antiquities that the French had found.
The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited in the British Museum since 1802, with only one break. Towards the end of the First World War, in 1917, when the Museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London, they moved it to safety along with other, portable, 'important' objects. The Rosetta Stone spent the next two years in a station on the Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below the ground at Holborn.
Date created: 196 BC
- Length: 112.30cm (max)
- Width: 75.70cm
- Thickness: 28.40cm
- Findspot Fort Saint Julien
- Period/culture: Ptolemaic
- Material: granodiorite
- Acquisition: Donated by George III. Excavated by Bouchard, Pierre Francois Xavier
- Sketchfab
- Google Cultural Institute
- Translation
- British Museum Collection
- ResearchSpace (currently 404 returned for this)
This repo holds decimated models for:
- 1 million faces
- 500,000 faces
- 10,0000 faces
One texture file was generated for the model displayed on Sketchfab. A better resolution might be achieved with 2 - 4 textures for this object.
To make this 3D representation of the Rosetta Stone, two cameras were used - a Nikon D5100 and a OnePlus 3 mobile phone. The case was opened as far as possible for the front face to be captured (the reverse does not open) and the reverse of the object was shot through the glass. Total time available to shoot this object was 1 hour due to staff availability.
The scanning of the Rosetta Stone, was requested by Emma Palmer to tie in with the publication of several blog posts on the BM Blog:
- Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone - permalink
- Inheriting the most iconic object at the British Museum - permalink
Several articles appeared online, claiming that this was the first ever scan of the stone (there are probably quite a few!) See for example:
The contents of this repository are licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA and we would ask you to respect these terms if you reuse our data or the model.
Photographs and models by Daniel Pett [email protected], Digital Humanities Lead, British Museum Copyright Trustees of the British Museum
Access arranged by Evan York, Neal Spencer and Ilona Regulski, Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, British Museum.