News and activities

News in 2025

Freeze of this Website in early 2025

Due to technical reasons, this website has been frozen in time on January 31, 2025, while maintaining all information and functionalities including the popular visual alignment of all versions on the Rosetta Stone. Please visit our new website at www.digital-rosetta-stone.org.
This website is showcasing all results of the Digital Rosetta Stone Project until early 2025. All new developments will be published on the new website. See also our account on GitHub.

Updated Alignment in Ugarit iAligner

Our Egyptian transliterations were updated on Ugarit - now featuring some nicer versions of aleph and ajin. Check it out here!

Treebanking of the Demotic version

Finally, the Demotic version of the Rosetta Stone is 'treebanked' now, that is added for morpho-syntactic analysis in the tool "Arethusa". For this, Josephine Hensel created a tagset of all grammatical elements of this stage of the Demotic language and script, which was added on GitHub to the Arethusa system. Feel free to play with it, e.g. here with a sample sentence:

If you click on the link, you will find the following example on display in Arethusa:

Rosetta Stone, Demotic Part, line 8:
nꜣ rmṯ.w r-wn-nꜣw ḏdtḥ i͗rm nꜣ.w wn-nꜣw wn lwḥ (r)-ꜥ.wj⸗w n ssw ꜥšꜣy wy⸗f r-r⸗w
"The men who were imprisoned and those against whom there were charges for long time, he has released them."

On the right-hand side, select ‘morph’ or ‘relation’ from the menu at the top.
Under ‘morph’, you can select single words to get their morphological attributes (= so-called ‘part of speech’).
Under ‘relation’, you will find the sentence structure visualized as a tree.

If you want to know how treebanking with Arethusa works, please check out this link including video tutorials (with an example for Latin language).

We will announce more soon on our new project website.

Back online: the Rosetta Stone Online project from HU Berlin

If you are interested in a full linguistic analysis of the trilingual text of the Rosetta Stone, check out the Rosetta Stone Online project of Daniel A. Werning, Eliese-Sophia Lincke, Thanasis Georgakopoulos and their students here: http://rosettastone.hieroglyphic-texts.net/.

News in 2023-2024

TED-Ed Video

We were very honored to have been asked by the TED-Ed organziation from New York to produce a TED-Ed video. Emmy Award winner Tim Rauch (for "We The People") designed a beautiful Lower Egyptian Landscape and became quite invested in Hieroglyphs and Demotic himself!
You can watch the video (with subtitles in many languages) here on YouTube.
You can find the accompagnying TED-Ed lesson here.

Educator: Franziska Naether
Director: Tim Rauch
Narrator: Christina Greer
Composer: Stephen LaRosa
Sound Designer: Stephen LaRosa
Director of Production: Gerta Xhelo
Produced by Abdallah Ewis
Editorial Director: Alex Rosenthal
Script Editor: Molly Bryson

SAW Leipzig and Leipzig University created press releases, see:
https://www.saw-leipzig.de/de/aktuelles/ted-ed-video-zum-rosetta-stein-mit-akademie-wissenschaftlerin-dr-franziska-naether
and
https://magazin.uni-leipzig.de/das-leipziger-universitaetsmagazin/artikel/online-video-erklaert-entzifferung-der-hieroglyphen-2024-03-27

Research publication about the Digital Rosetta Stone Project

Everything you ever wanted to know about the project is published here (proceedings of a conference in Bloomington, Indiana):
Miriam Amin/Angelos Barmpoutis/Monica Berti/Eleni Bozia/Josephine Hensel/Franziska Naether: The Digital Rosetta Stone Project, in: Rita Lucarelli/Joshua Roberson/Steve Vinson (eds.), Ancient Egypt, New Technology. The Present and Future of Computer Visualization, Virtual Reality and Other Digital Humanities in Egyptology, Harvard Egyptological Studies (HES) 17, Leiden / Boston: Brill 2022, open access and print, ISBN: 978-90-04-50128-7, e-ISBN: 978-90-04-50129-4,
https://brill.com/edcollbook-oa/title/55882?language=en

The Rosetta Stone in South Korea

The National Museum of World Writing Systems in Incheon in South Korea is one of the exciting new museum openings worldwide of the last years. We were happy to contribute data and expertise in 2023-2024. You can visit a replica of the Rosetta Stone here.

A Data Management Plan of the Project

In a class on Egyptology and Digital Humanities, Franziska Naether created together with students a data management plan, showing our commitment to open science. With the example of the Digital Rosetta Stone Project, students were enabled to understand the importance of such plans and their functions in the daily project management. You can access the plan on our GitHub account.

The new "TLA" - a re-vamp of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae

The latest installment of this immensurable helpful tool with full versions of Ancient Egyptian Texts features a new translation/transliteration of the Hieroglyphic version of the Rosetta Stone by Ralph Birk, aided by our new photos of the stone. Check it out here under its persistent URL:

thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/text/FNXUNEJ2OBGDPM6HCHZJC2672Q

The old 'legacy TLA' including Günter Vittmann's Demotic version can be found here:

aaew.bbaw.de/tla/ (guest login required, then follow "Gliederungshierarchie der Objekte und Texte" >> "Demotische Textdatenbank" >> "Objektaufschriften" >> "Stelen" >> "Synodaldekrete" >> "Rosettedekret" >> "Objekt" >> Rosettana"). All the comments to the lines provide also the Greek and Hieroglyphic versions in simple transliterations.

News in 2020-2022

Special Exhibitions featuring the Rosetta Stone in 2022 in London and Leipzig

We are involved in two exhibition projects featuring the Rosetta Stone: The special exhibition at the British Museum London (13 October 2022 to 29 January 2023) and the special exhibition at the Egyptian Museum Leipzig in cooperation with the Museum of the Printing Arts Leipzig (April-October 2022). Both will mark the 200th anniversary of the decipherment by Champollion, and focus on different topics. While the exhibition in Leipzig will feature the history of printing hieroglyphs and early Egyptology, the British Museum aims at telling the story of the provenance and aquisition of the stone, as well as contextualizing it in Ancient Egyptian culture.

3 July to 11 September 2022, Museum für Druckkunst Leipzig: "Neue Wege zu alter Weisheit. Hieroglyphen im Buchdruck" & 15 July to 13 November 2022, Egyptian Museum of Leipzig University: "Neue Wege zu alter Weisheit. 200 Jahre Entzifferung der altägyptischen Hieroglyphen"
13 October 2022 to 29 January 2023, British Museum London: Hieroglyphs: unlocking Ancient Egypt

Digital exhibition

We created a digital exhibition about the Rosetta Stone and our project. You can check out both here:

English version: https://ausstellungen.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/rosetta-stone/

German version: https://ausstellungen.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/stein-von-rosette/

Report: https://www.saw-leipzig.de/de/aktuelles/virtuelle-ausstellung-zur-geschichte-des-steins-von-rosette-vom-kompetenzwerkd

Making of: https://kompetenzwerkd.github.io/infoportal/blog/ddbstudio/

New Book on the Rosetta Stone by Friedhelm Hoffmann and Stefan Pfeiffer

This handy publication for a wider public features a new introduction and translation. We were happy to help with our new photos of the Rosetta Stone.

We won an Additional Grant!

Thanks to a generous grant from the BMBF and Leipzig University, we are able to finish the final steps in the treebanking of the Egyptian. Josephine is doing the milestone work of this - since it has never been done before - supported by our colleagues from the Treebannking application "Arethusa" and by Dr. Guiseppe Celano from Leipzig University.

Finalization of the Visualization

Miriam added the final touches to the visualization and the links to our finished Alignment in Ugarit iAligner. You can check out the alignment of the Hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek versions with a German and English translation here: http://ugarit.ialigner.com/userProfile.php?userid=74 There are a couple of alignment options to chose from.

Publications

In 2020, we will report on our project in two conference volumes:

in the proceedings of the Papyology Congress from July 2019 in Lecce, edited by Paola Davoli and Mario Capasso:

in the proceedings of the Conference in: Rita Lucarelli / Joshua Aaron Roberson / Stephen Vinson (eds.), Digital Egyptology, Harvard Egyptological Studies (HES), Leiden / Boston: Brill open access.

2017-2019 – the funded project (BMBF, see also the press section)

News in 2019

Lectures and Presentations

January 9, 2019: Seminar on Multilingualism in Old Testament (Prof. Angelika Berlejung), Leipzig

guest lecture by Franziska Naether

March 29-30, 2019, Bloomington, IN: Ancient Egypt and New Technology: The Present and Future of Computer Visualization, Virtual Reality and other Digital Humanities in Egyptology

lecture with Franziska Naether

group publication (open access): Miriam Amin/Angelos Barmpoutis/Monica Berti/Eleni Bozia/Josephine Hensel/Franziska Naether: The Digital Rosetta Stone Project, in: Rita Lucarelli/Joshua Roberson/Steve Vinson (eds.), Ancient Egypt, New Technology. The Present and Future of Computer Visualization, Virtual Reality and Other Digital Humanities in Egyptology, Harvard Egyptological Studies (HES) 17, Leiden / Boston: Brill 2022, open access and print, ISBN: 978-90-04-50128-7, e-ISBN: 978-90-04-50129-4, https://brill.com/edcollbook-oa/title/55882?language=en

More: www.indiana.edu/~iucweb/egyptology/call-for-papers/

July 28-August 3, 2019, Lecce, Italy: 29th International Congress of Papyrology

poster presentation with Franziska Naether; poster and extended abstract published in the proceedings of the conference.

More: https://www.papycongress2019.org/

A poster and extended abstract about our project is published here:

Miriam Amin/Monica Berti/Josephine Hensel/Franziska Naether: The Digital Rosetta Stone Project, in: Capasso, Mario/Davoli, Paola (eds): Proceedings of the 29th International Congress of Papyrology 2019 in Lecce, Lecce: Università del Salento 2022, 2 Vols, Vol 1, 87-89, eISBN: 978-88-8305-176-0, ISBN: 978-88-8305-177-7, DOI: 10.1285/i99788883051760, http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/29th_ICP/issue/view/1881

Due to overlapping dates, we unfortunately had to cancel our participation at the International Congress of Egyptology (ICE) in early November 2019.

Extensive Press Coverage

In November 2019, the Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk reported exclusively on the outcomes of the project. Please see out press section and the main article here: https://www.mdr.de/wissen/stein-von-rosette-digital-leipzig-100.html

News in 2018

Our Work in the British Museum

In June 2018, we did a fantastic thing: we were allowed to scan the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum London in 3D with the "shape-from-shading" technology, together with Prof. Eleni Bozia and Prof. Angelos Barmpoutis from Florida University. You can watch out lecture at the University of London, Digital Classicsts Seminar, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm_705Zwf9Y.

We will never forget this wonderful trip to London! Thanks to everyone involved in the British Museum, the Institute for Classics and the University of London, Florida University and to everyone else who supported us, including the Research Academy Leipzig, StiL and the Leibniz Mobility program for covering our expenses. This was the trip of a lifetime!

Depth Map

One of the outcomes is a new depth map of the Rosetta Stone. It is published here:
https://research.dwi.ufl.edu/angelos/download/Depthmap_of_Rosetta_Stone.pdf

Please cite this as: M. Amin, A. Barmpoutis, M. Berti, E. Bozia, J. Hensel, F. Naether, 2018. "Depth map of the Rosetta Stone", rosetta-stone.dh.uni-leipzig.de under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence

Details: Algorithm: Barmpoutis et al. MVA 21 (6), 2010, pp. 989-998
Iterations: 50
Lighting Directions: 4
Resolution: 81.41 µm (12 DPI equivalent)
Digitization Date: June 28, 2018
Composed by merging 8 depth map segments.

Rosetta Stone Images Compare

Monica Berti has created a "Rosetta Stone Images Compare" of the high resolution photo vs the depth map - all our creations. [Check it out here and play with the slider!](https://www.monicaberti.com/rosetta-stone/)

Lectures and Presentations

March 24, 2018, Stellenbosch University, presentation at the autumn meeting of the Classical Association of South Africa (CASA)

lecturer: Franziska Naether

May 18, 2018, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Digital Humanities Day Leipzig

poster presentation and Q&A with Franziska Naether

May 24, 2018, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig

lecturers: Miriam Amin, Monica Berti, Josephine Hensel, Franziska Naether

poster and hands-on presentation at "50th Neue Forschungen zur ägyptischen Sprache und Kultur"

June 22, 2018, Ägyptisches Museum Leipzig

lecturers: Miriam Amin, Monica Berti, Josephine Hensel, Franziska Naether

presentation and poster at "Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft" Leipzig

Official annoncement: Digital total? – Lehr-Lern-Projekte der LaborUniversität geben bei der Langen Nacht der Wissenschaften eine Antwort darauf
22. Juni 2018 | 18.00 – 24.00 Uhr | Ägyptisches Museum Georg Steindorff

Zusammen mit dem Ägyptologischen Institut dem Career Service der Universität Leipzig und der KOWA Leipzig gestaltet die LaborUniversität im Rahmen der Langen Nacht der Wissenschaften ein vielschichtiges Abendprogramm zum Thema „Digital total? – Die Universität Leipzig und die Vorbereitung auf die digitale Arbeitswelt von morgen“.
Mitten im Ambiente altägyptischer Kunst und Kultur soll es um die Frage gehen, wie die Universität Leipzig auf die digitale Arbeitswelt vorbereitet. Diskutiert wird dies zu Beginn von Vertreterinnen und Vertretern aus Wissenschaft und Arbeitswelt. Anschließend können die Besucherinnen und Besucher Studiengänge und Lehr-Lern-Projekten der Universität Leipzig kennenlernen, die aufzeigen, wie die digitalen Arbeitsweisen das Lernen und Lehren verändern und neue Kompetenzen erworben werden. Wir freuen uns, dass folgende Lehr-Lern-Projekte dabei sein werden:

June 26, 2018, Rektorat, Universität Leipzig

lecturers: Miriam Amin, Monica Berti, Josephine Hensel, Franziska Naether

final presentation for "LaborUNI"

June 29, 2018, University College London, Institute of Classical Studies, Senate House, Digital Classicist Lecture Series, 16:30 and live on YouTube

lecturers: Miriam Amin, Monica Berti, Josephine Hensel, Franziska Naether

project presentation and thoughts on standardization and customization

July 13-15, 2018, Universität Münster, Schloss, Ständige Ägyptologenkonferenz (SÄK)

poster presentation and Q&A with Franziska Naether

October 29-30, 2018, Universität Heidelberg, Herausforderungen bei der Analyse von alten Schriften im digitalen Zeitalter

poster presentation and Q&A with Josephine Hensel

November 6, 2018: "51st Neue Forschungen zur ägyptischen Kultur und Geschichte", Berlin

lecturers: Josephine Hensel and Franziska Naether

More: http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/aegyptologie/termine/51_-Neue-Forschungen-2018.html

November 7, 2018: "Tag der Lehre", Universität Leipzig

poster session and Q & A with Josephine Hensel and Franziska Naether

More: https://www.uni-leipzig.de/studium/tag-der-lehre/tag-der-lehre-2018.html

December 3, 2018: Dies academicus & Digital Humanties Day Leipzig, Universität Leipzig

lecture and poster session with Monica Berti and Franziska Naether

More: https://www.ub.uni-leipzig.de/aktuelles/aktuelles-einzelansicht/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=1814&cHash=f72196e99632667f5570588be2144b07

News in 2017

Lectures and Presentations

March 7, 2017, Franziska Naether at Stellenbosch University, Department for Ancient Studies, Postgraduates colloquium

October 5, 2017, group presentations at the LaborUNI kick-off (Pecha Kucha) and at the official project inauguration

British Museum 3D model of the Rosetta Stone

The raw data of the the 3D model done by the British museum is released on [GitHub](https://github.com/BritishMuseumDH/rosettaStone)

2017-2019 – the funded project (BMBF, see also the press section)

News in 2016

Lectures and Presentations

December 12, 2016, Franziska Naether at the Sunoikisis Planning Session, Washington/Leipzig

News in 2015

Lectures and Presentations

October 2, 2015, Franziska Naether at "Linked Ancient World Data Initiative – Digital Antiquity Coffee House (LAWDI)", ISAW, New York

November 4, 2015 group presentation at "DHEgypt15"; link to the presentation at QUCOSA:

Monica Berti, Giuseppe Celano, Julia Jushaninowa, Franziska Naether, Polina Yordanowa, The Digital Rosetta Stone. In: Berti, Monica; Naether, Franziska (Hrsg.): Altertumswissenschaften in a Digital Age – Egyptology, Papyrology and Beyond. Proceedings of a Conference and Workshop in Leipzig, November 4-6, 2015, Leipzig 2016 (open access), http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa-201500

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