World energy supply and consumption is global production and preparation of fuel, generation of electricity, energy transport and energy consumption. It is a basic part of economic activity. It does not include energy from food.
Coal, oil, and natural gas remain the primary global energy sources even as renewables have begun rapidly increasing.
World energy mix, 1965 to 2020
Many countries publish statistics on the energy supply and
consumption of either their own country, of other countries of interest,
or of all countries combined in one chart. One of the largest
organizations in this field, the International Energy Agency (IEA), publishes yearly comprehensive energy data.
This collection of energy balances is very large. This article provides a
brief description of energy supply and consumption, using statistics
summarized in tables, of the countries and regions that produce and
consume most.
Energy production is 80% fossil. Half of that is produced by China, the United States and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
The Gulf States and Russia export most of their production, largely to
the European Union and China where not enough energy is produced to
satisfy demand. Energy production increases slowly, except for solar and
wind energy which grows more than 20% per year.
Primary energy sources are transformed by the energy sector to generate energy carriers.
Produced energy, for instance crude oil, is processed to make it
suitable for consumption by end users. The supply chain between
production and final consumption involves many conversion activities and
much trade and transport among countries, causing a loss of one quarter
of energy before it is consumed.
Energy consumption per person in North America is very high while in developing countries it is low and more renewable. There was a significant decline in energy usage worldwide caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,
notably in the iron and steel industry as demand for new construction
shrank. To reach levels similar to that in 2019, there would need to be
an increase in the global demand for manufactured goods by the iron and steel industry.
Worldwide carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels was 38 gigatons in 2019.
In view of contemporary energy policy of countries the IEA expects that
worldwide energy consumption in 2040 will have increased more than a
quarter and that the goal, set in the Paris Agreement to limit climate change, will not nearly be reached. Several scenarios to achieve the goal are developed.
Primary energy production
World total primary energy consumption by fuel in 2020:
This is the worldwide production of energy, extracted or captured directly from natural sources. In energy statisticsprimary energy (PE) refers to the first stage where energy enters the supply chain before any further conversion or transformation process.
Primary energy assessment follows certain rules
to ease measurement of different kinds of energy. These rules are
controversial. Water and air flow energy that drives hydro and wind
turbines, and sunlight that powers solar panels, are not taken as PE,
which is set at the electric energy produced. But fossil and nuclear
energy are set at the reaction heat which is about 3 times the electric
energy. This measurement difference can lead to underestimating the
economic contribution of renewable energy.
The table lists the worldwide PE and the countries/regions
producing most (90%) of that. The amounts are rounded and given in
million tonnes of oil equivalent per year (1 Mtoe = 11.63 TWh, 1 TWh =
109 kWh). The data are of 2018.
Largest PE producers (90%) (Russia excluded in Europe)
Total
Coal
Oil & Gas
Nuclear
Renewable
China
2560
1860
325
77
300
United States
2170
369
1400
219
180
Middle East
2040
1
2030
2
4
Russia
1484
240
1165
54
25
Africa
1169
157
611
3
397
Europe
1111
171
398
244
296
India
574
289
67
10
208
Canada
529
31
422
26
50
Indonesia
451
288
102
0
61
Australia
412
287
115
0
9
Brazil
296
2
160
4
129
Kazakhstan
178
49
128
0
1
Mexico
159
7
132
4
16
World
14420
3890
7850
707
1972
In the Middle East, the Persian Gulf
states of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United
Arab Emirates produced the most. A small part came from Bahrain,
Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
The top producers in Africa were Nigeria (256), South Africa (158), Algeria (156), and Angola (85).
In Europe, Norway (207, oil and gas), France (135, mainly
nuclear), the United Kingdom (123), Germany (112), Poland (62, mainly
coal), and the Netherlands (36, mainly natural gas) produced the most.
Of the world's renewable energy supply, 68% is generated with
biofuel and waste, mostly in developing countries, 18% is generated with
hydropower and 14% with other renewables.
Natural-gas goes to natural-gas processing
plants to remove contaminants such as water, carbon dioxide and
hydrogen sulfide, and to adjust the heating value. It is used as fuel
gas, also in thermal power stations.
Nuclear reaction heat is used in thermal power stations.
The invention of the solar cell in 1954 started electricity generation by solar panels, connected to a power inverter. Around 2000 mass production of panels made this economic.
Much primary and converted energy is traded among countries, about 5800 Mtoe worldwide, mostly oil and gas.
The table lists countries/regions with large difference of export and import.
A negative value indicates that much energy import is needed for the economy.
The quantities are expressed in Mtoe/a and the data are of 2018.
Big transport goes by tanker ship, tank truck, LNG carrier, rail freight transport, pipeline and by electric power transmission.
Total Energy Supply
Total Energy Supply and Primary Energy
Location
TES
PE
China
3210
2560
Europe
1984
1111
India
919
574
Mid-East
760
2040
Russia
760
1484
Japan
426
50
S-Korea
282
45
Canada
298
529
World
14280
14420
Total Energy Supply (TES) indicates the sum of production and imports subtracting exports and storage changes.
For the whole world TES nearly equals primary energy PE because imports
and exports cancel out, but for countries/regions TES and PE differ in
quantity, and also in quality as secondary energy is involved, e.g.,
import of an oil refinery product. TES is all energy required to supply
energy for end users.
The table lists TES and PE for some countries/regions where these differ
much, and worldwide. The amounts are rounded and given in Mtoe. The
data are of 2018.
1 converted from Mtoe into TWh (1 Mtoe = 11.63 TWh) and from Quad BTU into TWh (1 Quad BTU = 293.07 TWh)
25% of worldwide primary production is used for conversion and
transport, and 6% for non-energy products like lubricants, asphalt and petrochemicals.
69% remains for end-users. Most of the energy lost by conversion occurs
in thermal electricity plants and the energy industry own use.
One needs to bear in mind that there are different qualities of energy.
Heat, especially at a relatively low temperature, is low-quality
energy, whereas electricity is high-quality energy. It takes around
3 kWh of heat to produce 1 kWh of electricity. But by the same token, a
kilowatt-hour of this high-quality electricity can be used to pump
several kilowatt-hours of heat into a building using a heat pump. And
electricity can be used in many ways in which heat cannot. So the "loss"
of energy incurred when generating electricity is not the same as a
loss due to, say, resistance in power lines.
Final consumption
World total final consumption of 9,717 Mtoe by region in 2017 (IEA, 2019):
Total final consumption (TFC) is the worldwide consumption of energy by end-users (whereas primary energy consumption (Eurostat)
or total energy supply (IEA) is total energy demand and thus also
includes what the energy sector uses itself and transformation and
distribution losses). This energy consists of fuel (78%) and electricity
(22%). The tables list amounts, expressed in million tonnes of oil
equivalent per year (1 Mtoe = 11.63 TWh) and how much of these is
renewable energy. Non-energy products are not considered here. The data
are of 2018.
The first table lists final consumption in the countries/regions
which use most (85%), and per person. In developing countries fuel
consumption per person is low and more renewable. Canada, Venezuela and
Brazil generate most electricity with hydropower.
Final consumption in most using countries and per person
Fuel Mtoe
of which renewable
Electricity Mtoe
of which renewable
TFC pp toe
China
1436
6%
555
30%
1.4
United States
1106
8%
339
19%
4.4
Europe
982
11%
309
39%
2.5
Africa
531
58%
57
23%
0.5
India
487
32%
104
25%
0.4
Russia
369
1%
65
26%
3.0
Japan
201
3%
81
19%
2.2
Brazil
166
38%
45
78%
1.0
Indonesia
126
21%
22
14%
0.6
Canada
139
8%
45
83%
5.0
Iran
147
0%
22
6%
2.1
Mexico
95
7%
25
18%
1.0
S-Korea
85
5%
46
5%
2.6
Australia
60
7%
18
21%
3.2
Argentina
42
7%
11
27%
1.2
Venezuela
20
3%
6
88%
0.9
World
7050
14%
1970
30%
1.2
In Africa 32 of the 48 nations are declared to be in an energy crisis by the World Bank. See Energy in Africa.
The next table shows countries consuming most (85%) in Europe.
Countries consuming most (85%) in Europe.
Country
Fuel Mtoe
of which renewable
Electricity Mtoe
of which renewable
Germany
156
10%
45
46%
France
100
12%
38
21%
United Kingdom
95
5%
26
40%
Italy
87
9%
25
39%
Spain
60
10%
21
43%
Poland
58
12%
12
16%
Ukraine
38
5%
10
12%
Netherlands
36
4%
9
16%
Belgium
26
8%
7
23%
Sweden
20
35%
11
72%
Austria
20
19%
5
86%
Romania
19
20%
4
57%
Finland
18
34%
7
39%
Portugal
11
20%
4
67%
Denmark
11
15%
3
71%
Norway
8
16%
10
100%
Trend
In the period 2005–2017 worldwide final consumption of
Some fuel and electricity is used to construct, maintain and
demolish/recycle installations that produce fuel and electricity, such
as oil platforms, uranium isotope separators and wind turbines.
For these producers to be economic the ratio of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) or energy return on investment (EROI) should be large enough.
If the final energy delivered for consumption is E and the EROI
equals R, then the net energy available is E-E/R. The percentage
available energy is 100-100/R. For R>10 more than 90% is available
but for R=2 only 50% and for R=1 none. This steep decline is known as
the net energy cliff.
Outlook
IEA scenarios
In World Energy Outlook 2021 (WEO) the IEA presents four scenarios based on the computer Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC).
Net Zero by 2050 (NZE) is an integral part of the WEO.
In Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) IEA assesses the
likely effects of 2021 policy settings. This would lead to global
average temperatures still rising when they hit 2.6 °C above
pre-industrial levels in 2100.
The Announced Pledges Scenario (APS) assumes that all
climate commitments will be met in full and on time. Average temperature
will rise to around 2.1 °C by 2100 and continues to increase.
The Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS) assumes in
addition to APS a surge in clean energy policies and investment.
Advanced economies reach net zero emissions by 2050, China around 2060,
and all other countries by 2070 at the latest. Then temperature will
peak at 1.7 °C by 2050 and could decline to 1.5 °C by 2100. In 2050 energy supply will be 55% renewable. Electricity generation will be 58% renewable and 8% nuclear.
The Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario (NZE) reaches global net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. Temperature will peak at 1.7 °C by 2050 and decline to 1.4 °C by 2100.
In 2050 half of energy consumption will be electricity, generated for
nearly 70% by wind and solar PV, about 20% with other renewable sources
and most of the remainder from nuclear power. The other half is biomass,
gas and oil with CCS (carbon capture and storage) or non-energetic
(asphalt, petrochemicals). Use of coal falls 90%, oil 75% and gas 55%. Emission by the transport sector drops 90%, the remainder mainly caused by heavy trucks, shipping and aviation.
Investing in new fossil fuels is no longer necessary now (2021).
Annual energy investment is expected to increase from just over $ 2
trillion worldwide on average over the past five years to nearly $ 5
trillion by 2030 and to $ 4.5 trillion by 2050. The bulk will be spent
on generating, storing, and distributing electricity, and electrical
end-user equipment (heat pumps, vehicles).
Alternative scenarios
Alternative Achieving the Paris Climate Agreement Goals
scenarios are developed by a team of 20 scientists at the University of
Technology of Sydney, the German Aerospace Center, and the University
of Melbourne, using IEA data but proposing transition to nearly 100%
renewables by mid-century, along with steps such as reforestation.
Nuclear power and carbon capture are excluded in these scenarios.
The researchers say the costs will be far less than the $5 trillion per
year governments currently spend subsidizing the fossil fuel industries
responsible for climate change (page ix).
In the +2.0 C (global warming) Scenario total primary energy
demand in 2040 can be 450 EJ = 10755 Mtoe, or 400 EJ = 9560 Mtoe in the
+1.5 Scenario, well below the current production.
Renewable sources can increase their share to 300 EJ in the +2.0 C
Scenario or 330 PJ in the +1.5 Scenario in 2040. In 2050 renewables can
cover nearly all energy demand. Non-energy consumption will still
include fossil fuels. See Fig.5 on p.xxvii.
Global electricity generation from renewable energy sources will
reach 88% by 2040 and 100% by 2050 in the alternative scenarios. "New"
renewables — mainly wind, solar and geothermal energy — will contribute
83% of the total electricity generated (p.xxiv). The average annual
investment required between 2015 and 2050, including costs for
additional power plants to produce hydrogen and synthetic fuels and for
plant replacement, will be around $1.4 trillion (p.182).
Shifts from domestic aviation to rail and from road to rail are needed. Passenger car use must decrease in the OECD
countries (but increase in developing world regions) after 2020. The
passenger car use decline will be partly compensated by strong increase
in public transport rail and bus systems. See Fig.4 on p.xxii.
CO2 emission can reduce from 32 Gt in 2015 to 7 Gt
(+2.0 Scenario) or 2.7 Gt (+1.5 Scenario) in 2040, and to zero in 2050
(p.xxviii).
The stone was carved during the Hellenistic period and is believed to have originally been displayed within a temple, possibly at nearby Sais. It was probably moved in late antiquity or during the Mameluk period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was discovered there in July 1799 by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt.
It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern
times, and it aroused widespread public interest with its potential to
decipher this previously untranslated hieroglyphic script. Lithographic
copies and plaster casts soon began circulating among European museums
and scholars. When the British defeated the French they took the stone
to London under the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. It has been on public display at the British Museum almost continuously since 1802 and is the most visited object there.
Study of the decree was already underway when the first complete translation of the Greek text was published in 1803. Jean-François Champollion
announced the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts in Paris in 1822;
it took longer still before scholars were able to read Ancient Egyptian
inscriptions and literature confidently. Major advances in the decoding
were recognition that the stone offered three versions of the same text
(1799); that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign
names (1802); that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had
pervasive similarities to the demotic (1814); and that phonetic
characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words (1822–1824).
Three other fragmentary copies of the same decree were discovered
later, and several similar Egyptian bilingual or trilingual
inscriptions are now known, including three slightly earlier Ptolemaic decrees: the Decree of Alexandria in 243 BC, the Decree of Canopus in 238 BC, and the Memphis decree of Ptolemy IV,
c. 218 BC. The Rosetta Stone is no longer unique, but it was the
essential key to the modern understanding of ancient Egyptian literature
and civilisation. The term 'Rosetta Stone' is now used to refer to the
essential clue to a new field of knowledge.
Description
3D model, click to interact.
The Rosetta Stone is listed as "a stone of black granodiorite,
bearing three inscriptions ... found at Rosetta" in a contemporary
catalogue of the artefacts discovered by the French expedition and
surrendered to British troops in 1801. At some period after its arrival in London, the inscriptions were coloured in white chalk to make them more legible, and the remaining surface was covered with a layer of carnauba wax designed to protect it from visitors' fingers. This gave a dark colour to the stone that led to its mistaken identification as black basalt.
These additions were removed when the stone was cleaned in 1999,
revealing the original dark grey tint of the rock, the sparkle of its
crystalline structure, and a pink vein running across the top left corner. Comparisons with the Klemm collection of Egyptian rock samples showed a close resemblance to rock from a small granodiorite quarry at Gebel Tingar on the west bank of the Nile, west of Elephantine in the region of Aswan; the pink vein is typical of granodiorite from this region.
The Rosetta Stone is 1,123 millimetres (3 ft 8 in) high at its
highest point, 757 mm (2 ft 5.8 in) wide, and 284 mm (11 in) thick. It
weighs approximately 760 kilograms (1,680 lb). It bears three inscriptions: the top register in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the second in the Egyptian Demotic script, and the third in Ancient Greek. The front surface is polished and the inscriptions lightly incised
on it; the sides of the stone are smoothed, but the back is only
roughly worked, presumably because it would have not been visible when
the stele was erected.
Original stele
One possible reconstruction of the original stele
The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele. No additional fragments were found in later searches of the Rosetta site.
Owing to its damaged state, none of the three texts is complete. The
top register, composed of Egyptian hieroglyphs, suffered the most
damage. Only the last 14 lines of the hieroglyphic text can be seen; all
of them are broken on the right side, and 12 of them on the left. Below
it, the middle register of demotic text has survived best; it has 32
lines, of which the first 14 are slightly damaged on the right side. The
bottom register of Greek text contains 54 lines, of which the first 27
survive in full; the rest are increasingly fragmentary due to a diagonal
break at the bottom right of the stone.
The full length of the hieroglyphic text and the total size of the
original stele, of which the Rosetta Stone is a fragment, can be
estimated based on comparable steles that have survived, including other
copies of the same order. The slightly earlier decree of Canopus, erected in 238 BC during the reign of Ptolemy III,
is 2,190 millimetres high (7.19 ft) and 820 mm (32 in) wide, and
contains 36 lines of hieroglyphic text, 73 of demotic text, and 74 of
Greek. The texts are of similar length.
From such comparisons, it can be estimated that an additional 14 or 15
lines of hieroglyphic inscription are missing from the top register of
the Rosetta Stone, amounting to another 300 millimetres (12 in).
In addition to the inscriptions, there would probably have been a scene
depicting the king being presented to the gods, topped with a winged
disc, as on the Canopus Stele. These parallels, and a hieroglyphic sign
for "stela" on the stone itself,
(see Gardiner's sign list), suggest that it originally had a rounded top. The height of the original stele is estimated to have been about 149 centimetres (4 ft 11 in).
The stele was erected after the coronation of King Ptolemy V and was inscribed with a decree that established the divine cult of the new ruler. The decree was issued by a congress of priests who gathered at Memphis. The date is given as "4 Xandikos" in the Macedonian calendar and "18 Mekhir" in the Egyptian calendar, which corresponds to 27 March196 BC.
The year is stated as the ninth year of Ptolemy V's reign (equated with
197/196 BC), which is confirmed by naming four priests who officiated
in that year: Aetos son of Aetos was priest of the divine cults of Alexander the Great and the five Ptolemies down to Ptolemy V himself; the other three priests named in turn in the inscription are those who led the worship of Berenice Euergetis (wife of Ptolemy III), Arsinoe Philadelphos (wife and sister of Ptolemy II), and Arsinoe Philopator, mother of Ptolemy V. However, a second date is also given in the Greek and hieroglyphic texts, corresponding to 27 November 197 BC, the official anniversary of Ptolemy's coronation. The demotic text conflicts with this, listing consecutive days in March for the decree and the anniversary.
It is uncertain why this discrepancy exists, but it is clear that the
decree was issued in 196 BC and that it was designed to re-establish the
rule of the Ptolemaic kings over Egypt.
The decree was issued during a turbulent period in Egyptian history. Ptolemy V Epiphanes reigned from 204 to 181 BC, the son of Ptolemy IV Philopator
and his wife and sister Arsinoe. He had become ruler at the age of five
after the sudden death of both of his parents, who were murdered in a
conspiracy that involved Ptolemy IV's mistress Agathoclea, according to contemporary sources. The conspirators effectively ruled Egypt as Ptolemy V's guardians until a revolt broke out two years later under general Tlepolemus,
when Agathoclea and her family were lynched by a mob in Alexandria.
Tlepolemus, in turn, was replaced as guardian in 201 BC by Aristomenes of Alyzia, who was chief minister at the time of the Memphis decree.
Political forces beyond the borders of Egypt exacerbated the internal problems of the Ptolemaic kingdom. Antiochus III the Great and Philip V of Macedon had made a pact to divide Egypt's overseas possessions. Philip had seized several islands and cities in Caria and Thrace, while the Battle of Panium (198 BC) had resulted in the transfer of Coele-Syria, including Judaea, from the Ptolemies to the Seleucids. Meanwhile, in the south of Egypt, there was a long-standing revolt that had begun during the reign of Ptolemy IV, led by Horwennefer and by his successor Ankhwennefer.
Both the war and the internal revolt were still ongoing when the young
Ptolemy V was officially crowned at Memphis at the age of 12 (seven
years after the start of his reign) and when, just over a year later,
the Memphis decree was issued.
Stelae of this kind, which were established on the initiative of the
temples rather than that of the king, are unique to Ptolemaic Egypt. In
the preceding Pharaonic period it would have been unheard of for anyone
but the divine rulers themselves to make national decisions: by
contrast, this way of honoring a king was a feature of Greek cities.
Rather than making his eulogy himself, the king had himself glorified
and deified by his subjects or representative groups of his subjects. The decree records that Ptolemy V gave a gift of silver and grain to the temples. It also records that there was particularly high flooding of the Nile in the eighth year of his reign, and he had the excess waters dammed for the benefit of the farmers.
In return the priesthood pledged that the king's birthday and
coronation days would be celebrated annually and that all the priests of
Egypt would serve him alongside the other gods. The decree concludes
with the instruction that a copy was to be placed in every temple,
inscribed in the "language of the gods" (Egyptian hieroglyphs), the
"language of documents" (Demotic), and the "language of the Greeks" as
used by the Ptolemaic government.
Securing the favour of the priesthood was essential for the Ptolemaic kings to retain effective rule over the populace. The High Priests of Memphis—where
the king was crowned—were particularly important, as they were the
highest religious authorities of the time and had influence throughout
the kingdom.
Given that the decree was issued at Memphis, the ancient capital of
Egypt, rather than Alexandria, the centre of government of the ruling
Ptolemies, it is evident that the young king was anxious to gain their
active support. Thus, although the government of Egypt had been Greek-speaking ever since the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Memphis decree, like the three similar earlier decrees, included texts in Egyptian to show its connection to the general populace by way of the literate Egyptian priesthood.
There can be no one definitive English translation of the decree,
not only because modern understanding of the ancient languages
continues to develop, but also because of the minor differences between
the three original texts. Older translations by E. A. Wallis Budge (1904, 1913) and Edwyn R. Bevan (1927)
are easily available but are now outdated, as can be seen by comparing
them with the recent translation by R. S. Simpson, which is based on the
demotic text and can be found online,
or, best of all, with the modern translations of all three texts, with
introduction and facsimile drawing, that were published by Quirke and
Andrews in 1989.
The stele was almost certainly not originally placed at Rashid (Rosetta) where it was found, but more likely came from a temple site farther inland, possibly the royal town of Sais. The temple from which it originally came was probably closed around AD 392 when Roman emperorTheodosius I ordered the closing of all non-Christian temples of worship.
The original stele broke at some point, its largest piece becoming what
we now know as the Rosetta Stone. Ancient Egyptian temples were later
used as quarries for new construction, and the Rosetta Stone probably
was re-used in this manner. Later it was incorporated in the foundations
of a fortress constructed by the MamelukeSultanQaitbay (c. 1416/18–1496) to defend the Bolbitine branch of the Nile at Rashid. There it lay for at least another three centuries until its rediscovery.
Three other inscriptions relevant to the same Memphis decree have been found since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone: the Nubayrah Stele, a stele found in Elephantine and Noub Taha, and an inscription found at the Temple of Philae (on the Philae obelisk).
Unlike the Rosetta Stone, the hieroglyphic texts of these inscriptions
were relatively intact. The Rosetta Stone had been deciphered long
before they were found, but later Egyptologists have used them to refine
the reconstruction of the hieroglyphs that must have been used in the
lost portions of the hieroglyphic text on the Rosetta Stone.
Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt inspired a burst of Egyptomania in Europe, and especially France. A corps of 167 technical experts (savants), known as the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, accompanied the French expeditionary army to Egypt. On 15 July 1799, French soldiers under the command of Colonel d'Hautpoul were strengthening the defences of Fort Julien, a couple of miles north-east of the Egyptian port city of Rosetta (modern-day Rashid). Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard spotted a slab with inscriptions on one side that the soldiers had uncovered. He and d'Hautpoul saw at once that it might be important and informed General Jacques-François Menou, who happened to be at Rosetta. The find was announced to Napoleon's newly founded scientific association in Cairo, the Institut d'Égypte, in a report by Commission member Michel Ange Lancret
noting that it contained three inscriptions, the first in hieroglyphs
and the third in Greek, and rightly suggesting that the three
inscriptions were versions of the same text. Lancret's report, dated 19 July 1799, was read to a meeting of the Institute soon after 25 July.
Bouchard, meanwhile, transported the stone to Cairo for examination by
scholars. Napoleon himself inspected what had already begun to be called
la Pierre de Rosette, the Rosetta Stone, shortly before his return to France in August 1799.
The discovery was reported in September in Courrier de l'Égypte,
the official newspaper of the French expedition. The anonymous reporter
expressed a hope that the stone might one day be the key to deciphering
hieroglyphs.
In 1800 three of the commission's technical experts devised ways to
make copies of the texts on the stone. One of these experts was Jean-Joseph Marcel, a printer and gifted linguist, who is credited as the first to recognise that the middle text was written in the Egyptian demotic script, rarely used for stone inscriptions and seldom seen by scholars at that time, rather than Syriac as had originally been thought. It was artist and inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté who found a way to use the stone itself as a printing block to reproduce the inscription. A slightly different method was adopted by Antoine Galland. The prints that resulted were taken to Paris by General Charles Dugua. Scholars in Europe were now able to see the inscriptions and attempt to read them.
After Napoleon's departure, French troops held off British and Ottoman attacks for another 18 months. In March 1801, the British landed at Aboukir Bay.
Menou was now in command of the French expedition. His troops,
including the commission, marched north towards the Mediterranean coast
to meet the enemy, transporting the stone along with many other
antiquities. He was defeated in battle, and the remnant of his army
retreated to Alexandria where they were surrounded and besieged, with the stone now inside the city. Menou surrendered on August 30.
From French to British possession
Left
and right sides of the Rosetta Stone, with inscriptions in English
relating to its capture by English forces from the French
After the surrender, a dispute arose over the fate of the French
archaeological and scientific discoveries in Egypt, including the
artefacts, biological specimens, notes, plans, and drawings collected by
the members of the commission. Menou refused to hand them over,
claiming that they belonged to the institute. British General John Hely-Hutchinson refused to end the siege until Menou gave in. Scholars Edward Daniel Clarke and William Richard Hamilton,
newly arrived from England, agreed to examine the collections in
Alexandria and said they had found many artefacts that the French had
not revealed. In a letter home, Clarke said that "we found much more in
their possession than was represented or imagined".
Hutchinson claimed that all materials were property of the British Crown, but French scholar Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
told Clarke and Hamilton that the French would rather burn all their
discoveries than turn them over, referring ominously to the destruction
of the Library of Alexandria.
Clarke and Hamilton pleaded the French scholars' case to Hutchinson,
who finally agreed that items such as natural history specimens would be
considered the scholars' private property. Menou quickly claimed the stone, too, as his private property. Hutchinson was equally aware of the stone's unique value and rejected
Menou's claim. Eventually an agreement was reached, and the transfer of
the objects was incorporated into the Capitulation of Alexandria signed by representatives of the British, French, and Ottoman forces.
It is not clear exactly how the stone was transferred into British hands, as contemporary accounts differ. Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who was to escort it to England, claimed later that he had personally seized it from Menou and carried it away on a gun-carriage.
In a much more detailed account, Edward Daniel Clarke stated that a
French "officer and member of the Institute" had taken him, his student
John Cripps, and Hamilton secretly into the back streets behind Menou's
residence and revealed the stone hidden under protective carpets among
Menou's baggage. According to Clarke, their informant feared that the
stone might be stolen if French soldiers saw it. Hutchinson was informed
at once and the stone was taken away—possibly by Turner and his
gun-carriage.
Turner brought the stone to England aboard the captured French frigate HMS Egyptienne, landing in Portsmouth in February 1802. His orders were to present it and the other antiquities to King George III. The King, represented by War SecretaryLord Hobart, directed that it should be placed in the British Museum. According to Turner's narrative, he and Hobart agreed that the stone should be presented to scholars at the Society of Antiquaries of London, of which Turner was a member, before its final deposit in the museum. It was first seen and discussed there at a meeting on 11 March 1802.
In 1802, the Society created four plaster casts of the inscriptions, which were given to the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh and to Trinity College Dublin. Soon afterwards, prints of the inscriptions were made and circulated to European scholars. Before the end of 1802, the stone was transferred to the British Museum, where it is located today. New inscriptions painted in white on the left and right edges of the slab stated that it was "Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801" and "Presented by King George III".
The stone has been exhibited almost continuously in the British Museum since June 1802.
During the middle of the 19th century, it was given the inventory
number "EA 24", "EA" standing for "Egyptian Antiquities". It was part of
a collection of ancient Egyptian monuments captured from the French
expedition, including a sarcophagus of Nectanebo II (EA 10), the statue of a high priest of Amun (EA 81), and a large granite fist (EA 9). The objects were soon discovered to be too heavy for the floors of Montagu House
(the original building of The British Museum), and they were
transferred to a new extension that was added to the mansion. The
Rosetta Stone was transferred to the sculpture gallery in 1834 shortly
after Montagu House was demolished and replaced by the building that now
houses the British Museum. According to the museum's records, the Rosetta Stone is its most-visited single object, a simple image of it was the museum's best selling postcard for several decades,
and a wide variety of merchandise bearing the text from the Rosetta
Stone (or replicating its distinctive shape) is sold in the museum
shops.
Patrons at the British Museum view the Rosetta Stone as it was displayed in 1985
A crowd of visitors examining the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum
The Rosetta Stone was originally displayed at a slight angle from the
horizontal, and rested within a metal cradle that was made for it,
which involved shaving off very small portions of its sides to ensure
that the cradle fitted securely.
It originally had no protective covering, and it was found necessary by
1847 to place it in a protective frame, despite the presence of
attendants to ensure that it was not touched by visitors.
Since 2004 the conserved stone has been on display in a specially built
case in the centre of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. A replica of the
Rosetta Stone is now available in the King's Library of the British Museum, without a case and free to touch, as it would have appeared to early 19th-century visitors.
The museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London towards the end of the First World War
in 1917, and the Rosetta Stone was moved to safety, along with other
portable objects of value. The stone spent the next two years 15 m
(50 ft) below ground level in a station of the Postal Tube Railway at Mount Pleasant near Holborn.
Other than during wartime, the Rosetta Stone has left the British
Museum only once: for one month in October 1972, to be displayed
alongside Champollion's Lettre at the Louvre in Paris on the 150th anniversary of the letter's publication.
Even when the Rosetta Stone was undergoing conservation measures in
1999, the work was done in the gallery so that it could remain visible
to the public.
Hieroglyphs retained their pictorial appearance, and classical authors emphasised this aspect, in sharp contrast to the Greek and Roman alphabets. In the 5th century, the priest Horapollo wrote Hieroglyphica, an explanation of almost 200 glyphs.
His work was believed to be authoritative, yet it was misleading in
many ways, and this and other works were a lasting impediment to the
understanding of Egyptian writing. Later attempts at decipherment were made by Arab historians in medieval Egypt during the 9th and 10th centuries. Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya were the first historians to study hieroglyphs, by comparing them to the contemporary Coptic language used by Coptic priests in their time. The study of hieroglyphs continued with fruitless attempts at decipherment by European scholars, notably Johannes Goropius Becanus in the 16th century, Athanasius Kircher in the 17th, and Georg Zoëga in the 18th.
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided critical missing
information, gradually revealed by a succession of scholars, that
eventually allowed Jean-François Champollion to solve the puzzle that Kircher had called the riddle of the Sphinx.
Greek text
Richard Porson's suggested reconstruction of the missing Greek text (1803)
The Greek
text on the Rosetta Stone provided the starting point. Ancient Greek
was widely known to scholars, but they were not familiar with details of
its use in the Hellenistic period as a government language in Ptolemaic Egypt; large-scale discoveries of Greek papyri
were a long way in the future. Thus, the earliest translations of the
Greek text of the stone show the translators still struggling with the
historical context and with administrative and religious jargon. Stephen Weston verbally presented an English translation of the Greek text at a Society of Antiquaries meeting in April 1802.
Meanwhile, two of the lithographic copies made in Egypt had reached the Institut de France in Paris in 1801. There, librarian and antiquarian Gabriel de La Porte du Theil
set to work on a translation of the Greek, but he was dispatched
elsewhere on Napoleon's orders almost immediately, and he left his
unfinished work in the hands of colleague Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon. Ameilhon produced the first published translations of the Greek text in 1803, in both Latin and French to ensure that they would circulate widely. At Cambridge, Richard Porson
worked on the missing lower right corner of the Greek text. He produced
a skillful suggested reconstruction, which was soon being circulated by
the Society of Antiquaries alongside its prints of the inscription. At
almost the same moment, Christian Gottlob Heyne in Göttingen was making a new Latin translation of the Greek text that was more reliable than Ameilhon's and was first published in 1803. It was reprinted by the Society of Antiquaries in a special issue of its journal Archaeologia in 1811, alongside Weston's previously unpublished English translation, Colonel Turner's narrative, and other documents.
Demotic text
At the time of the stone's discovery, Swedish diplomat and scholar Johan David Åkerblad was working on a little-known script of which some examples had recently been found in Egypt, which came to be known as demotic. He called it "cursive Coptic" because he was convinced that it was used to record some form of the Coptic language (the direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian), although it had few similarities with the later Coptic script. French Orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
had been discussing this work with Åkerblad when, in 1801, he received
one of the early lithographic prints of the Rosetta Stone, from Jean-Antoine Chaptal
French minister of the interior. He realised that the middle text was
in this same script. He and Åkerblad set to work, both focusing on the
middle text and assuming that the script was alphabetical. They
attempted to identify the points where Greek names ought to occur within
this unknown text, by comparing it with the Greek. In 1802, Silvestre
de Sacy reported to Chaptal that he had successfully identified five
names ("Alexandros", "Alexandreia", "Ptolemaios", "Arsinoe", and Ptolemy's title "Epiphanes"),
while Åkerblad published an alphabet of 29 letters (more than half of
which were correct) that he had identified from the Greek names in the
demotic text. They could not, however, identify the remaining characters in the demotic text, which, as is now known, included ideographic and other symbols alongside the phonetic ones.
Champollion's table of hieroglyphic phonetic characters with their demotic and Coptic equivalents (1822)
Silvestre de Sacy eventually gave up work on the stone, but he was to
make another contribution. In 1811, prompted by discussions with a
Chinese student about Chinese script, Silvestre de Sacy considered a suggestion made by Georg Zoëga
in 1797 that the foreign names in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions
might be written phonetically; he also recalled that as early as 1761, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy had suggested that the characters enclosed in cartouches in hieroglyphic inscriptions were proper names. Thus, when Thomas Young, foreign secretary of the Royal Society of London,
wrote to him about the stone in 1814, Silvestre de Sacy suggested in
reply that in attempting to read the hieroglyphic text, Young might look
for cartouches that ought to contain Greek names and try to identify
phonetic characters in them.
Young did so, with two results that together paved the way for
the final decipherment. In the hieroglyphic text, he discovered the
phonetic characters "p t o l m e s" (in today's transliteration "p t w l m y s") that were used to write the Greek name "Ptolemaios".
He also noticed that these characters resembled the equivalent ones in
the demotic script, and went on to note as many as 80 similarities
between the hieroglyphic and demotic texts on the stone, an important
discovery because the two scripts were previously thought to be entirely
different from one another. This led him to deduce correctly that the
demotic script was only partly phonetic, also consisting of ideographic
characters derived from hieroglyphs. Young's new insights were prominent in the long article "Egypt" that he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1819. He could make no further progress, however.
In 1814, Young first exchanged correspondence about the stone with Jean-François Champollion, a teacher at Grenoble
who had produced a scholarly work on ancient Egypt. Champollion saw
copies of the brief hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions of the Philae obelisk in 1822, on which William John Bankes had tentatively noted the names "Ptolemaios" and "Kleopatra" in both languages. From this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters k l e o p a t r a (in today's transliteration q l i҆ w p 3 d r 3.t).
On the basis of this and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he
quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters,
completing his work on 14 September and announcing it publicly on 27
September in a lecture to the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. On the same day he wrote the famous "Lettre à M. Dacier" to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the Académie, detailing his discovery.
In the postscript Champollion notes that similar phonetic characters
seemed to occur in both Greek and Egyptian names, a hypothesis confirmed
in 1823, when he identified the names of pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose written in cartouches at Abu Simbel. These far older hieroglyphic inscriptions had been copied by Bankes and sent to Champollion by Jean-Nicolas Huyot. From this point, the stories of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs
diverge, as Champollion drew on many other texts to develop an Ancient
Egyptian grammar and a hieroglyphic dictionary which were published
after his death in 1832.
Later work
Replica of the Rosetta Stone, displayed as the original used to be, available to touch, in what was the King's Library of the British Museum, now the Enlightenment Gallery
Work on the stone now focused on fuller understanding of the texts
and their contexts by comparing the three versions with one another. In
1824 Classical scholar Antoine-Jean Letronne
promised to prepare a new literal translation of the Greek text for
Champollion's use. Champollion in return promised an analysis of all the
points at which the three texts seemed to differ. Following
Champollion's sudden death in 1832, his draft of this analysis could not
be found, and Letronne's work stalled. François Salvolini,
Champollion's former student and assistant, died in 1838, and this
analysis and other missing drafts were found among his papers. This
discovery incidentally demonstrated that Salvolini's own publication on
the stone, published in 1837, was plagiarism.
Letronne was at last able to complete his commentary on the Greek text
and his new French translation of it, which appeared in 1841. During the early 1850s, German Egyptologists Heinrich Brugsch and Max Uhlemann produced revised Latin translations based on the demotic and hieroglyphic texts. The first English translation followed in 1858, the work of three members of the Philomathean Society at the University of Pennsylvania.
Whether one of the three texts was the standard version, from
which the other two were originally translated, is a question that has
remained controversial. Letronne attempted to show in 1841 that the
Greek version, the product of the Egyptian government under the
Macedonian Ptolemies, was the original.
Among recent authors, John Ray has stated that "the hieroglyphs were
the most important of the scripts on the stone: they were there for the
gods to read, and the more learned of their priesthood".
Philippe Derchain and Heinz Josef Thissen have argued that all three
versions were composed simultaneously, while Stephen Quirke sees in the
decree "an intricate coalescence of three vital textual traditions". Richard Parkinson
points out that the hieroglyphic version strays from archaic formalism
and occasionally lapses into language closer to that of the demotic
register that the priests more commonly used in everyday life.
The fact that the three versions cannot be matched word for word helps
to explain why the decipherment has been more difficult than originally
expected, especially for those original scholars who were expecting an
exact bilingual key to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Even before the Salvolini affair, disputes over precedence and
plagiarism punctuated the decipherment story. Thomas Young's work is
acknowledged in Champollion's 1822 Lettre à M. Dacier, but incompletely, according to early British critics: for example, James Browne, a sub-editor on the Encyclopædia Britannica (which had published Young's 1819 article), anonymously contributed a series of review articles to the Edinburgh Review in 1823, praising Young's work highly and alleging that the "unscrupulous" Champollion plagiarised it. These articles were translated into French by Julius Klaproth and published in book form in 1827. Young's own 1823 publication reasserted the contribution that he had made. The early deaths of Young (1829) and Champollion (1832) did not put an end to these disputes. In his work on the stone in 1904 E. A. Wallis Budge gave special emphasis to Young's contribution compared with Champollion's.
In the early 1970s, French visitors complained that the portrait of
Champollion was smaller than one of Young on an adjacent information
panel; English visitors complained that the opposite was true. The
portraits were in fact the same size.
In 2005, the British Museum presented Egypt with a full-sized
fibreglass colour-matched replica of the stele. This was initially
displayed in the renovated Rashid National Museum, an Ottoman house in the town of Rashid (Rosetta), the closest city to the site where the stone was found.
In November 2005, Hawass suggested a three-month loan of the Rosetta
Stone, while reiterating the eventual goal of a permanent return.
In December 2009, he proposed to drop his claim for the permanent
return of the Rosetta Stone if the British Museum lent the stone to
Egypt for three months for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza in 2013.
A replica of the Rosetta Stone in Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt
As John Ray has observed, "the day may come when the stone has spent longer in the British Museum than it ever did in Rosetta."
There is strong opposition among national museums to the repatriation
of objects of international cultural significance such as the Rosetta
Stone. In response to repeated Greek requests for return of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon
and similar requests to other museums around the world, in 2002 over 30
of the world's leading museums—including the British Museum, the
Louvre, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum
in New York City—issued a joint statement declaring that "objects
acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different
sensitivities and values reflective of that earlier era" and that
"museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of
every nation".
Idiomatic use
Various ancient bilingual or even trilingual epigraphical
documents have sometimes been described as "Rosetta stones", as they
permitted the decipherment of ancient written scripts. For example, the
bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins of the Greco-Bactrian king Agathocles have been described as "little Rosetta stones", allowing Christian Lassen's initial progress towards deciphering the Brahmi script, thus unlocking ancient Indian epigraphy. The Behistun inscription has also been compared to the Rosetta stone, as it links the translations of three ancient Middle-Eastern languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian.
The term Rosetta stone has been also used idiomatically
to denote the first crucial key in the process of decryption of encoded
information, especially when a small but representative sample is
recognised as the clue to understanding a larger whole. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first figurative use of the term appeared in the 1902 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica relating to an entry on the chemical analysis of glucose. Another use of the phrase is found in H. G. Wells' 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, where the protagonist finds a manuscript written in shorthand that provides a key to understanding additional scattered material that is sketched out in both longhand and on typewriter.
Since then, the term has been widely used in other contexts. For example, Nobel laureateTheodor W. Hänsch in a 1979 Scientific American article on spectroscopy
wrote that "the spectrum of the hydrogen atoms has proven to be the
Rosetta Stone of modern physics: once this pattern of lines had been
deciphered much else could also be understood". Fully understanding the key set of genes to the human leucocyte antigen has been described as "the Rosetta Stone of immunology". The flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been called the "Rosetta Stone of flowering time". A gamma-ray burst (GRB) found in conjunction with a supernova has been called a Rosetta Stone for understanding the origin of GRBs. The technique of Doppler echocardiography has been called a Rosetta Stone for clinicians trying to understand the complex process by which the left ventricle of the human heart can be filled during various forms of diastolic dysfunction.
Other non-linguistic uses of "Rosetta" to name software include the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, launched to study the comet67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in the hope that determining its composition will advance understanding of the origins of the Solar System. One program, billed as a "lightweight dynamic translator" that enables applications compiled for PowerPC processors to run on x86 processor Apple Inc. systems, is named "Rosetta". The Rosetta@home endeavor is a distributed computing project for predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences (i.e. translating sequence into structure).
The name is used for various forms of translation software. "Rosetta Stone" is a brand of language-learning software published by Rosetta Stone Inc., who are headquartered in Arlington County, US. And "Rosetta", developed and maintained by Canonical as part of the Launchpad project, is an online language translation tool to help with localisation of software.
Most comprehensively, the Rosetta Project
brings language specialists and native speakers together to develop a
meaningful survey and near-permanent archive of 1,500 languages, in
physical and digital form, with the intent of it remaining useful from
AD 2000 to 12,000.
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