ROSETTA (Coptic Rashit, Arabic Rashid)  , a town situated at the western or " Rosetta " mouth of the Nile on the west bank . It was called Bolbitine by the Greeks, but according to Herodotus the Bolbitine mouth was artificial, and it was evidently of little importance compared with the Canopic, Sebennytic and Pelusiac mouths . When the other branches and the Alexandria canal silted up, Rosetta prospered like its sister port of Damietta on the eastern branch; the main trade of the overland route to India passed through it until Mehemet Ali cut a new canal joining Alexandria to the Nile . Rosetta is now much decayed . Its population in 1907 was 16,81o, almost entirely Mussulman . A railway joins it to Alexandria . The celebrated Rosetta Stone which supplied Champollion with the key for the decipherment of the ancient monuments of Egypt was found near Fort St Julien, 4 M . N. of the town, in 1799, by Boussard, a French officer . It is a basalt stele inscribed in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek with a decree of the priests assembled at Memphis in favour of Ptolemy V . Epiphanes . It was ceded to the English at the capitulation of Alexandria (18or) and is now in the British Museum . See EGYPT: II .

Ancient Egypt,

section D . " Writing." (F . LL .