Rosetta Stone

Mediums: stone slabs.
Location: Place des ecritures, Figeac (France).

The ancient artefact known as Rosetta Stone has been exhibited at the British Museum since 1802. Experts consider it the key to understanding the language of ancient Egypt since it contains a decree issued by Pharaoh Ptolemy V in 196 BC. The text was written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in Egyptian demotic and ancient Greek. This fact perfectly corresponded to Joseph Kosuth’s interest in equivalents between languages ​​and things, as well as in the ways the language is used to identify, explain and describe objects. In the late 1980s, Kossuth and many of his assistants began to make a giant copy of the Rosetta stone and then installed it on the sidewalk as a public installation in the city of Fijac, next to the house of Egyptologist-linguist Jean-Francois Champollion. The French government issued a postage stamp in honor of this work of the master.