Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4. Every day I walk through the Egyptian sculpture gallery at the British Museum and every day

there are tour guides speaking every imaginable language addressing groups of visitors

who are craning to see the object that I'll be talking about in this program.

It's on every visitor's itinerary and with the mummies it's the most popular object in the British Museum. Why?

To look at it is decidedly dull. It's a grey stone about the size of one of those large suitcases

you see people trundling around on wheels at airports

and the rough edges show that it's been broken from a larger stone with the fractures cutting

across the text that covers one side and when you read that text it's pretty dull

too it's mostly bureaucratic jargon about tax concessions but as so often in the

museum appearances are deceiving because this dreary bit of broken granite

has played a starring role in three fascinating and different stories.

The story of the Greek kings who ruled in Alexandria after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt

the story of the French and British imperial competition across the Middle East after Napoleon invaded Egypt and the extraordinary but peaceful

scholarly contest that led to the most famous

decipherment in history. The cracking of hieroglyphics.

In the Memphis decree, we find a Greek view of the world in Egyptian terms.

I think it's quite weird, why you would put this sort of a statement which is a

basically a statement of tax exemption on such a heavy stone I mean it

760 kilograms why did they do that? A history of the world in a hundred objects. The Rosetta Stone erected in 196 BC.

The Rosetta Stone erected in 196 BC, Fandat El Rashid, Egypt. This is a week of objects connected to shifting empires and

legendary rulers from Alexander the Great to the Emperor Augustus. Over 2,000 years ago, from the Mediterranean

and the Middle East to India and China, these leaders found different ways of

...