Editing Rosetta Stone (section)

===Later work===
[[File:Copy of Rosetta Stone.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|alt="Replica of the Rosetta Stone in the King's Library of the British Museum as it would have appeared to 19th century visitors, open to the air, held in a cradle that is at a slight angle from the horizontal and available to touch"|Replica of the Rosetta Stone, displayed as the original used to be, available to touch, in what was the [[King's Library]] of the British Museum, now the Enlightenment Gallery]]
Work on the stone now focused on fuller understanding of the texts and their contexts by comparing the three versions with one another. In 1824 Classical scholar [[Jean Antoine Letronne|Antoine-Jean Letronne]] promised to prepare a new literal translation of the Greek text for Champollion's use. Champollion in return promised an analysis of all the points at which the three texts seemed to differ. Following Champollion's sudden death in 1832, his draft of this analysis could not be found, and Letronne's work stalled. [[Francesco Salvolini|François Salvolini]], Champollion's former student and assistant, died in 1838, and this analysis and other missing drafts were found among his papers. This discovery incidentally demonstrated that Salvolini's own publication on the stone, published in 1837, was [[plagiarism]].{{Cref2|O}} Letronne was at last able to complete his commentary on the Greek text and his new French translation of it, which appeared in 1841.{{Cref2|P}} During the early 1850s, German Egyptologists [[Heinrich Karl Brugsch|Heinrich Brugsch]] and [[Max Uhlemann]] produced revised Latin translations based on the demotic and hieroglyphic texts.{{Cref2|Q}}{{Cref2|R}} The first English translation followed in 1858, the work of three members of the [[Philomathean Society]] at the [[University of Pennsylvania]].{{Cref2|S}}

Whether one of the three texts was the standard version, from which the other two were originally translated, is a question that has remained controversial. Letronne attempted to show in 1841 that the Greek version, the product of the Egyptian government under the Macedonian [[Ptolemies]], was the original.{{Cref2|P}} 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".<ref name="Ray3"/> 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".<ref>[[#Quirke69|Quirke and Andrews (1989)]] p.&nbsp;10</ref> [[Richard B. Parkinson|Richard Parkinson]] points out that the hieroglyphic version strays from archaic formalism and occasionally lapses into language closer to that of the demotic register that the priests more commonly used in everyday life.<ref name="focus13">[[#Parkinson70|Parkinson (2005)]] p.&nbsp;13</ref> The fact that the three versions cannot be matched word for word helps to explain why the decipherment has been more difficult than originally expected, especially for those original scholars who were expecting an exact bilingual key to Egyptian hieroglyphs.<ref name="Cracking3031">[[#Parkinson69|Parkinson et al. (1999)]] pp.&nbsp;30–31</ref>