In the first week of January, I wrote about Lars Liebmann's Rosetta Stone of Lithography in two posts The History of Lithography, Part 1: From Stones to Lasers and The History of Lithography, Part 2: From Double-Patterning to EUV. Today, the real one.

The Rosetta Stone

The real Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum in London, the largest museum in the world. It is apparently the most popular exhibit in the whole museum. You are unlikely to miss it since there will almost certainly be dozens of tourists crowding around it (you can see some of them reflected in the glass in my not-very-clear photo). If you go in through the main entrance to the museum, the Rosetta Stone is in the Egyptian Sculpture gallery to the left, the first thing you come to through the door.

These days, even Google thinks that the Rosetta Stone is a company that supplies language learning and the real Rosetta Stone has to content itself with second place in its search listings. There is a reason that the language learning products are named after the Rosetta Stone and also a reason that the phrase is used for something that is the essential key to a topic, like the Lars' table.

The stone is made of a type of granite and is carved with a decree from 196BC. It weighs 1676 pounds (760 kilograms). What made it unique, at least when it was first discovered, was that it had the decree in three different languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics (not then deciphered), Demotic script (another script that was indecipherable at the time), and Ancient Greek. The stone is damaged and incomplete, so lots of the texts, especially the hieroglyphics at the top, is missing.

Ancient Greek was well-known but Egyptian hieroglyphics were not really understood. The Rosetta Stone, with essentially a long hieroglyphic passage with an accompanying Greek translation, suddenly made a lot more clear. I say suddenly, but it actually took more like 20 years before hieroglyphics started to be decoded.

The stone was presumably displayed in a temple but was then used as a building material in a fort in Rashid/Rosetta. It was discovered there during the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt in 1799. But the French didn’t get to keep it for long since they were defeated by the British in 1801. It was taken to the British Museum (nobody really knows quite how) and has been on display there since 1802, except during the world wars when it was moved to keep it safe from bombing.

There have been demands for the return of the Rosetta Stone to Egypt. I think that was unlikely to happen anyway—the Elgin Marbles have been demanded by Greece for much longer—but given what happened to the buildings in Palmyra in Syria, it is clear it will remain in London.

There's lots more in the British Museum, of course. If you plan a visit, then I recommend listening to some of the episodes of the podcast The History of the World in 100 Objects. Each episode is about one object in the British Museum. The series was made 10 years ago, but given that most of the objects are hundreds if not thousands of years old, the episodes don't go out of date. The Rosetta Stone is episode 33.

The British Museum is on Great Russell Street in London. It is not that easy to find since it is midway between several tube (subway) stations and not straight along a street from any of them: Tottenham Court Road, Holborn (pronounced hoe-burn), Goodge Street and Russell Square. Here is the British Museum website.

The British Museum Algorithm

At DAC a few years ago on a panel session, Sifuei Ku of Microsemi (now part of Microchip) memorably described the old way of selecting corners for cell characterization as "The British Museum Algorithm":

You walk everywhere, but if you don't walk to just the right place, you miss something.

Nowadays we use machine learning approaches to select the appropriate corners. (For details, see my post Liberate Trio: Characterization Suite in the Cloud.) It would be good if the audio guides in places like the British Museum or the Louvre took the same approach, learning what you were interested in and taking you on a more customized route through the galleries. A startup opportunity?

Sir John Soane's Museum

And if you are not museumed-out after the British Museum, don’t miss nearby Sir John Soane’s Museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It is as small and quirky as the British Museum is large and comprehensive. It is my favorite museum in London. From their website:

Sir John Soane’s Museum is a national museum, displaying the extraordinary collections amassed by renowned British architect Sir John Soane, including antiquities, furniture, sculptures, architectural models and drawings, and paintings including work by Hogarth, Turner, and Canaletto. Spanning continents and millennia, many objects are on permanent display. You can also browse the Museum’s collections of thousands of objects online.

Here is their website.

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