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But Egypt's foreign rulers, from the Romans to the Turks to the British, have always made free with Egypt's heritage.
埃及的異族統治者們，不管是羅馬人、土耳其人還是英國人，都隨意地處置埃及歷史遺產。
Egypt, for two thousand years, had foreign rulers and in '52 much was made of the fact that Nasser was the first Egyptian ruler since the pharaohs, and I guess we've had two more since, although with varying results."
埃及已被異族統治了2千年，1952年，納賽爾終于成為埃及自法老時代之后的第一位本土統治者。
The Stone was brought back to the British Museum and immediately put on display-in the public domain, freely available for every scholar in the world to see-and copies and transcriptions were published worldwide.
石碑被帶回大英博物館后立刻進行了公開展覽。全世界的學者都能參觀，文字的抄本與拓本也一并公之于世。
European scholars now set about the task of understanding the mysterious hieroglyphic script.
歐洲學者立即著手破譯神秘的象形文字。
The Greek inscription was the one that every scholar could read, and was therefore seen to be the key.
石碑上的希臘文每個學者都能讀懂，這被認為是破譯的關鍵。
But everybody was stuck. A brilliant English physicist and polymath, Thomas Young, correctly worked out that a group of hieroglyphs repeated several times on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name-that of Ptolemy.
但沒人取得任何進展。直到一位聰穎博學的英國學者托馬斯楊發現一組在石碑上反復出現的象形文字代表了一個王室姓氏的發音—托勒密。
It was a crucial first step, but Young hadn't quite cracked the code.
這使得研究邁出了關鍵性的第一步，但他也沒能成功破譯所有文字。
A French scholar, Jean-Francois Champollion, then realised that not only the symbols for Ptolemy but all the hieroglyphs were both pictorial 'and' phonetic - they recorded the 'sound' of the Egyptian language.
法國學者讓弗朗索瓦商博良其后發現，所有的象形文字都是既象形又表音的。這種文字也記錄下了埃及語的發音。
For example - on the last line of the hieroglyphic text on the stone, three signs spell out the sounds of the word for 'stone slab' in Egyptian-'ahaj', and then a fourth sign gives a picture showing the stone as it would originally have looked:
例如，在石碑上象形文字的最后一行，先有三個符號代表了“石板”（埃及文為“ahaj”）一詞的發音，緊接其后的第四個符號則描畫了石碑原本的樣子：
a square slab with a rounded top. So sound and picture work together.
一塊有圓頂的方形石板。音與意便以這種方式結合起來。
