Page "Rosetta Stone" Paragraph 46

The question of whether one of the three texts was the standard version from which the other two were originally translated has remained controversial.

Letronne, in 1841, attempted to show that the Greek version ( that of the Egyptian government under its Ptolemaic dynasty ) 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, straying from archaic formalism, 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 its decipherment has been more difficult than originally expected, especially for those original scholars who were expecting an exact bilingual key to Egyptian hieroglyphs.