ShmoopTube

00:00

Thank you We sneak in the seventeen seventies there was

00:05

the french general napoleon bonaparte who wanted to take over

00:10

the world So the british empire and the french were

00:14

like arch nemesis And they both wanted control of europe

00:18

Europe was vastly important to them Napoleon was smart though

00:21

he was kind of intimidated by the british empire So

00:25

he wanted to challenge them But he didn't want to

00:27

kind of attack directly So what He decided to dio

00:30

wass interrupt their trade routes between britain and india which

00:35

would you know cut off supplies cut off severely annoy

00:40

them And so to do that he decided to take

00:42

over parts of the middle east So he decided to

00:45

invade egypt Egypt at the time was ruled by the

00:48

ottoman empire napoleon to gather support He sold it to

00:53

the front as a chance for historical and scientific Avery

00:57

so it's probably like let's do it for science And

01:01

i guess he got plenty of support to do it

01:03

because he went ahead and invaded So there you go

01:05

He ordered the commander's teo just grab and go mainly

01:08

focusing on precious artifacts one day of his french army

01:12

Captain was in the town of rosetta and he was

01:14

ordering his troops and he was just like go tear

01:17

down this wall just somewhat or no it won't demolishes

01:20

wall i don't want to hear any more i don't

01:23

like it and then he noticed wait hold up there's

01:26

this big black rock with writing on it let's go

01:29

check with that His first might be important Turns out

01:32

it was it was the biggest archaeological find pretty much

01:36

ever this rock that this french army captain discovered what

01:40

ended up being called the rosetta stone They're rosetta stone

01:42

contained three different languages on it It has egyptian higher

01:45

cliff ix egyptian lettering and also ancient greek it's super

01:49

convenient right Oh just wait there's more at the time

01:53

no one knew how to read hybrid olympics That was

01:55

basically a thing that scholars increased still new and everybody

01:59

else just like you old fogeys keep your higher olympics

02:04

I'm going to use this newfangled letter thing So the

02:08

last sons on the slab super important said something along

02:12

the lines of yo just so you know this is

02:17

the same sentence repeated in three different language Btw so

02:21

pretty important just like a little like side note They

02:24

like hey helping out her french scholar jean francois champollion

02:30

He was the first one to translate it and figure

02:33

it all out broke The code was a rock star

02:38

So you think about it kind of in a roundabout

02:40

way and napoleon was sort of responsible for the discovery

02:43

of it which i'm sure is what he told people

02:46

of dinner parties until he died But by eighteen o

02:48

to the british empire actually did take back over and

02:52

had control of egypt The rosetta stone was then shipped

02:55

off to london and put in the british museum of 00:02:57.93 --> [endTime] london and it's still there today

Full Transcript