Laura Holmes, age 15, of Champaigne, T11., for her question:

HOW OLD TS THE ROSETTA STONE?

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment covered with hieroglyphics and other ancient languages. Scientists say it was carved to commemorate the crowning of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, the king who ruled Egypt from

203 to 181 B.C. The stone was found half buried in the mud near the Rosetta mouth of. the Nile River in 1799. Tt is now In London's British Museum.

The language of ancient Egypt had been a riddle to scholars for hundreds of years. Then the Rosetta Stone solved that riddle. scholars translated the stone and provided the key to the language used by the ancient Egyptians.

The stone is three feet nine inches high and two feet four inches across. The first inscription is in ancient Egyptian hieroqlyphics. The second is in Demotic, the popular language of Egypt at that time. At the bottom that same message is written again in Greek.

Translation was done by a French scholar named Jean Francois Champollion. He first translated the Greek portion. using this text as a guide, he next studied the position and repetition of proper names in the Greek text and was able to pick out the same names in the Egyptian text. This enabled him to learn the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphic characters.