British Museum creates 3D image of the Rosetta Stone

You no longer have to visit the British Museum in London to see the Rosetta Stone in detail.

Last week, the museum published the first 3D scan of the famous slab of hieroglyphics.

The Rosetta Stone is one the most important artefacts from ancient civilization. Discovered in 1799 it became the key to understanding ancient Egypt. It features nearly identical texts in Demotic, ancient Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and scholars compared the texts to unravel the hieroglyphic alphabet.

The Rosetta Stone arrived in England in February 1802 and was offered to the British Museum in July.

“This scan was part of our larger attempt to capture as many of our iconic pieces from the collection – and indeed the unseen in store objects — and make them available for people to view in 3D or in more tactile forms,” Daniel Pett, a British Museum adviser who helped make the scan, told Digital Trends.

The stone isn’t the only object that the British Museum has scanned for the public. The Jericho skull (a plastered human skull that dates to between 7,000 and 6,000 BC), the Jennings Dog (a large Roman sculpture), and a series of Japanese netsuke figurines have also been scanned and uploaded online.