Rosetta Stone(s)?
According to Bassam El Shammaa, Egyptologist and tour guide, the famous Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, the focus of a controversy regarding rightful ownership, is not the only one of its kind. There are even better preserved and more ancient inscriptions of the same text written on the Rosetta Stone, whose discovery in 1799 was crucial in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by Thomas Young and Jean Francois Champollion.
The Rosetta Stone contains a proclamation by the pharaoh exempting the priests and temples from taxation. El Shammaa claims this decree was traditionally proclaimed every time a new pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty ascended to the throne of Egypt. The researcher mentions two similar stelae discovered in Kom El Hesn in the Western Delta and currently exhibited in the Greco-Roman section of the Egyptian Museum. They are known as the Canopy Stones because they were found at an archaeological site near Canopy, the extinct estuary of the Nile located 100 km from Rashid. These “Canopy Stones” display the same royal text as that of its famous counterpart.
Says Bassam El Shammaa:
“The Canopy Stones are even older as they date back to King Ptolemy III, whereas the Rosetta Stone marked the ascension of King Ptolemy V to the throne of Egypt.”
“When the Canopy Stones were discovered in Kom El Hesn, we found out that the hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek texts were the same as the ones carved on the Rosetta Stone, but with the only difference that the Canopy Stones were intact.”
“Comparing the versions, we also detected a spelling mistake in the last line of the Greek text, a fact that could probably prove that the texts on the Rosetta Stone were inscribed by Egyptians.”
The Egyptologist questions why the Egyptian Museum authorities display a replica of the British Museum Rosetta Stone when they could showcase these two better preserved originals.
The inscriptions in the Rosetta and the Canopy stones command that “this decree be carved on stones and displayed at all the temples beside the sovereign’s eternal figure.” Bassam El Shammaa insists that a search be carried out to find similar stones that probably still remain buried in the Inner Sanctum chamber beneath the temples at Edfu, Dendara and Philae, among other Egyptian Ptolemaic temples.
