The Rosetta Stone Was Not a One-Off Stone

And the Library of Alexandria Never Really Died

By 196 BCE, stone-tablet messaging was already ancient. Hammurabi did it in 1750 BCE. Moses (if he was real) did it around 1250 BCE. Every empire from Lagash to Persia had planted its own forest of stelae. The technology was two thousand years old: write the truth on something harder than your enemies, make copies, scatter them.

Yet in the spring of 196 BCE a frightened priesthood and a teenage king dusted off the oldest trick in the book one last time.

They carved a routine propaganda decree in three scripts (hieroglyphs, demotic, Greek) and mass-produced it: dozens, possibly fifty or more identical slabs shipped to every major temple in Egypt.

They knew the Library of Alexandria was dying. They knew the languages were drifting apart. They knew the dream of one continuous human timeline was slipping. So they scattered lifeboats.

They always know when the end is coming. Every great civilization, at the moment it still looks invincible, develops the same reflex: it starts hiding copies.

Irish monks copying Latin classics while Vikings burn the mainland. Baghdad scribes stuffing manuscripts into wells before the Mongols. Mayan priests burying bark-paper books as the cities empty. Alexandrians mailing fifty Rosetta copies to every temple they still controlled.

The Rosetta Stone is exceptional for one reason only: it is the one set of stones that came with the decoder ring still attached.

Everywhere else on earth, at the exact same time, people were carving the same urgent message into stone, bronze, jade, and bone: Indus seals, oracle bones, Olmec stelae, Hittite cliff reliefs, Chavín monoliths. We have the hard drives. We still can’t read most of them.

The Rosetta copies are the only ancient mass-produced archive that shipped with the plaintext and the cipher on the same slab. That is why one muddy fort wall near Rashid (Rosetta to the French) in 1799 changed everything: it was the only lifeboat that came with the instruction manual still strapped to the seat.

Everywhere else, the message survived. Only in Egypt did the key survive with it. One set of stones remembered to include the “If found, please read like this” note. That is the difference between a fossil and a resurrection.

The orphan and the widow still have a witness. And the witness is no longer one stone in London. It is every copy we keep making, in every medium we can invent, on every rock we can reach.

We never stopped carving lifeboats. We just keep changing the material.

Mack McColl proposed and Grok By xAI wrote for  McColl Magazine Daily – 25 November 2025