Materials Included In Kit

Additional Materials Required

Prelab Preparation

Use the masters to prepare enough copies of all the print materials for each lab group. Students can work alone or in teams. Make the appropriate number of copies for your classroom organization.

Safety Precautions

Follow normal laboratory safety rules during this pencil and paper exercise.

Teacher Tips

• Extra copies of print materials are always helpful as students ruin their sheets and require replacements. The activity can be completed in 1–2 class periods with additional work completed as homework.
• You may want to have students turn in their Deciphering Chart before they start to decode the Rosetta II Stones.
• All students do not have to decode all of the messages. You can assign 1–3 messages depending upon the speed of various groups.
• Decoding messages is a thought-provoking process that some students will find very enjoyable and challenging. The skill is not universal and can be frustrating for some.
• The introductory letter is fictitious, but based on the history of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is a compact basalt slab (114 x 72 x 28 cm) that was found in July 1799 in the small Eqyptian village of Rosetta located in the western delta of the Nile. The Rosetta Stone contains three inscriptions that represent a single text (the decree of the priests of Memphis in honor of Ptolemaios V 196 B.C.) in three varieties of script. The text appears in the form of hieroglyphs (script of the official and religious texts), of Demotic (everyday Egyptian script), and in Greek. The representation of a single text of the three mentioned script variants enables the French scholar Jean Francois Champollian (1790–1832) to decipher the hieroglyphs in 1822. In this activity, the languages associated with Rosetta II and the mystery stones are all fictitious. The messages are, however, appropriate for earlier cultures and useful for making inferences about other cultures.
• A slight variation is introduced in Nomo and Skribly by the use of a single symbol to represent two letters in the English language. Wosak reads from top to bottom, right to left. Remind students that not all current day languages read from top to bottom.

Further Extensions

• Have students prepare their own messages using one of the three languages (Nomo, Skribly or Wosak).
• Have students further research the Rosetta Stone.
• Have students do research on current day languages and their alphabets.

Sample Data

Rosetta II Decoding Chart

Answers to Questions

Translation of Message

1. What can you say about the person who wrote this message?

   Nomo: This person may be a law maker or be associated with the temples.

   Skribly: This person is training for the military away from home.

   Wosak: This person is probably a farmer or trader.

2. Did this person live in the city or on a farm? How do you know?

   Nomo: Probably the city. This person is talking about farmers.

   Skribly: Could be from the city or a farm.

   Wosak: Probably the country. Spoke of farming.

3. Can you infer anything about the society from which this message came or its beliefs? If so, what?

   Nomo: Priests have much authority. Farmers probably support the priests through their offerings. The people believe the gods have the power to punish them if they do wrong.

   Skribly: This society expects its youth to participate in rigourous military training. Youth live away from home during military training.

   Wosak: This is an agricultural and trading society. It produces wheat, oats, barley and flax. Goats are raised for meat; fish are caught, dried and sold; skins of animals are useful and sold.

Introduction

On Location in Egypt

18 August 1799
Pierre du Mont, Curator
Museum of Archeology
The Royal Gardens
Paris, France

Dear Pierre:

Excuse the excitement with which I write! As you know, our crew has been working on repairs of the old Fort St. Julien here in Rosetta (called by the natives “Rashid”), 30 miles outside Alexandria. In the midst of work yesterday, one of the laborers turned up a most unusual discovery: an irregularly shaped black stone, about 120 cm long and 60 cm wide, with the most curious writing on it. It seems to be a message written in three different languages. I recognize one of them as Greek, and the other two of them seem to be versions of the lovely picture writing we see so often here in Egypt. Should it turn out to be the same message written in all the scripts, you can imagine what an important discovery this will be! It will, at last, provide us with a key to unlock the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphics about which we now know almost nothing.

I have made arrangements to have the stone shipped back to Paris as soon as we have some relief from our concerns about the British troops now threatening our garrisons here. In the meanwhile, please relay the message about this discovery—which we have called the “Rosetta Stone”—to our friends and colleagues in Paris. We will keep you informed of later developments.

Your Friend,
Boussard

This letter is one that might very well have been written in 1799. It describes a very important find that made it possible for modern linguists (scientists who study language) to decipher some of the very earliest forms of writing. The Rosetta Stone turned out to be the key by which modern scientists learned how to read Egyptian “picture-writing”... hieroglyphics.

The deciphering of the Rosetta Stone was a very difficult but exciting task that required years of work. Your challenge, in this activity, will be to decode a modern day version of the Rosetta Stone—Rosetta, II.

Concepts

• Rosetta stone
• Cryptography
• Linguistics
• Hieroglyphics

Materials

Safety Precautions

Follow all normal laboratory safety rules.

Procedure

1. Locate the Rosetta II English and Nomo Message Sheet. Study the two messages carefully and decipher the Nomo language. When the symbols of the Nomo language have been deciphered, write the symbol of each letter in the Nomo column on the Rosetta II Decoding Chart.
2. Use the Nomo symbols to decipher Mystery Stone 1.
3. Write the Mystery Stone message and answer the questions for Nomo on the Deciphering Message Worksheet.
4. Repeat steps 1–3 using the same English message for the Skribly society and complete the appropriate parts of the worksheets.
5. Repeat steps 1–3 for the Wosak society and complete the appropriate parts of the worksheets.

Student Worksheet PDF

13949_Student1.pdf