The Rosetta Stone: Creating a Digital Replica

In 1798 Napoleon sent a large corps of scientists and scholars to accompany his troops in Egypt. Intended to establish his Enlightenment cred, these scholars sent back various reports to France. On July 19, 1799, one of those experts sent a letter detailing an ancient stone that contained writing in three languages:  undecipherable Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Demotic, and ancient Greek. That find, the Rosetta Stone, was the key to understanding ancient Egyptian writing and an entire civilization.

In an early 19th century form of competitive crowdsourcing, many casts and lithographs of the stone were made and a diverse field of scholars used them to spend the next twenty years deciphering the unknown Egyptian languages.

Direct Dimensions joined that community of scholars, lithographers and cast makers when we 3D scanned one of the original casts of the Rosetta Stone to make a digital replica (without touching the precious original artifact).

The final 3D model is a 21st century digital copy that is 3d printable and will allow scholars and Egyptophiles to continue to analyze (or even own) an exact copy of the original.

Read more about the 3D scanning of the Rosetta Stone on our website.