The Rosetta Stone and what it actually says with Ilona Regulski | Curator's Corner S7 Ep7
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The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the British Museum. But what is it? What does it actually say? And did you know that since the discove...

This video is really cool. It’s a curator talking about what is on the stone and why. They were supposed to be put in every temple in Egypt and were done so for many years, which is why so many have been discovered since the original famous one.

    • M137@lemmy.worldEnglish
      682·
      3 months ago

      Cool, but do you realize this isn’t your personal website where everything is posted specifically for you?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      551·
      3 months ago

      I’ve been watching the whole series. It’s all amazing. It sucks that the British Museum has all of this stuff in the first place, but I’m glad they at least give curators a chance to tell the public about them in their own words.

      • Paraponera_clavata@lemmy.worldEnglish
        92·
        3 months ago

        Hot take; would humanity have as many if Europeans/British didn’t excavate them and put them in their own museums? I’m thinking we’d still have some, right? How much longer would it have taken to decipher?

        That topic would make an interesting YouTube series.

        • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
          15·
          3 months ago

          Europeans pretty notoriously also destroyed a TON of things, especially in the antiquarian days. Schliemann with “troy” would be one of these but also like all of the native American things that weren’t precious metals. So many Maya codices just torched. So many things just plowed under and away.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            5·
            3 months ago

            The codices weren’t destroyed by antiquarians, they were destroyed by Catholic priests and their cronies who thought they were sinful long before the antiquarian era.

            But what Schliemann did to Troy (and to other digs he supervised) was criminal. What happened with Pompeii, similarly criminal.

        • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          3 months ago

          Thing is, a lot of it was looted. Not even like “Napoleon” style looted specifically for museums, like straight up, “The only reason we have it is because some officer thought it would make a nice trinket and snapped it off of some priceless altar and got bored of it and donated it later in life” sort of thing.

          There’s a reason archeologists look on archeology in the 19th century with a good deal of cringe, and it’s not just the rampant racism and sexism. A LOT got destroyed in the process of “We want to learn about these things but we have no cultural frame of reference to study it in except to steal it from These People™”

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            4·
            3 months ago

            They also equated “valuable” with “important for knowledge,” meaning that people like Heinrich Schliemann at Troy just bulldozed through things like pottery and domestic debris which would tell us about every day Trojan culture and just stopped when he found gold, something only the elite would have had for decoration.