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CPNZ t1_j6zo8e5 wrote

Interestingly "the" Rosetta Stone was only one of many copies - "According to the inscription on the Stone, an identical copy of the declaration was to be placed in every sizeable temple across Egypt. Whether this happened is unknown, but copies of the same bilingual, three-script decree have now been found and can be seen in other museums. The Rosetta Stone is thus one of many mass-produced stelae designed to widely disseminate an agreement issued by a council of priests in 196 BC. In fact, the text on the Stone is a copy of a prototype that was composed about a century earlier in the 3rd century BC. Only the date and the names were changed!" https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-know-about-rosetta-stone

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steveosek t1_j7065q8 wrote

Their existence makes sense given historical context. Egypt, particularly Alexandria, was mutli-cultural as hell eventually, with people from all over the region being in it. Lots of trade, so putting these stones out is the modern day equivalent of cities that get a lot of international travelers having signs in multiple languages.

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gingersaurus82 t1_j70ybyl wrote

I don't think it was for the foreigners. The Rosetta stone is written in Greek, the language of the ruling elite; and ancient Egyptian, the language of the local masses. The Egyptian is further written in both hyroglyphics, the religious script for priests, since it was posted at and the text concerned temple taxes; and demotic, the common script, used in daily life for record keeping, letters, etc.

Any foreigner happening upon it would have to be able to both speak and write one of these two languages.

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XanderTheMander t1_j71bgbb wrote

It's more like how California has tons of things in Spanish and English.

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Devil-sAdvocate t1_j72mz2j wrote

> Any foreigner happening upon it would have to be able to both speak and write one of these two languages.

Only literate ones, and only those literate ones who knew one of those languages.

Scholars have estimated that at the high point of Greek civilization, fewer than one-third of the adult population could read or write. Even so, literacy was more widespread in the Greco-Roman world than it was in many other ancient civilizations, where the ability to read or write was limited to a small number of priests or scribes.

Very few people were literate in Egypt- almost all of them officials of state. Estimates are as low as 1% of the population as being literate in Egypt and up to 5% being the high end of the estimate.

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steveosek t1_j74vpb4 wrote

Very true. Also wasn't Greek pretty much the universal language of the time for writing? Like didn't even the Romans write in Greek a lot too?

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Devil-sAdvocate t1_j75c9q7 wrote

After Rome conquered Greece (~175 BC) they took a bunch of educated Greeks as slaves to do administration duties/scribes.

Then after the empire split, The Eastern Roman Empire mostly used Greek while the Western mostly used Latin.

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