The history of modern, scientific archaeology is little more than a century old. Before 1890, western interest in the ancient Near East was basically a hunt for treasures to stock the great national museums of Europe.1 This interest in antiquities began to develop into a disciplined, enlightened effort thanks to the work of Sir William Flinders Petrie. This was particularly true for SyroPalestinian archaeology. We mark his brief encounter with Tell el-Hesi, not far from Gaza, in 1890, as the stellar point. It was in the publication of that six week long excavation that he presented the principles that permeated his work: digging according to the stratigraphy and dating according to typology.2 The application and refinement of those principles have continued to define modern archaeology to this very day. During and since PetrieOs time (he died in Jerusalem in 1940), a vast number of excavations throughout the Middle East have recovered a tremendous volume of objects, including those bearing writing from the dim past of the biblical world. But some of the most significant finds were accidental rather than methodically recovered in excavations. A primary example that comes to mind was the discovery of the scrolls recovered from the caves near Khirbet Qumran by Bedouin shepherds in 1947. Today we are recalling an equally significant discovery made not a half-century but two centuries agoNthe discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is an 11 inch thick slab of black basalt about 3 ft. 9 in. tall and 2 ft. 4.5 in. wide. In its original form it was apparently rectangular, per-

https://www.andrews.edu/library/car/cardigital/Periodicals/Journal_of_the_Adventist_Theological_Society/2001/2001_01.pdf

The Rosetta Stone in Historical Perspective

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P. E. Cleator

Papers

Archaeology in the making