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Listen to an Academic Talk Test #087
Listen to an Academic Talk
1. What is the main purpose of the talk?
A) To describe the process of carving stone inscriptions
B) To compare different ancient writing systems
C) To explain the historical significance of an artifact
D) To discuss the military campaign during which an object was found
2. What feature of the Rosetta Stone was essential for its translation?
A) Its excellent physical condition
B) The presence of the same text in three scripts
C) The poetic language used in the decree
D) Its discovery by a team of scholars
3. What does the lecturer imply about ancient Egyptian civilization before the Rosetta Stone was deciphered?
A) Its history was primarily understood through Greek texts.
B) Its writing was believed to be purely decorative.
C) Knowledge about its culture was very limited.
D) It was considered less important than Greek civilization.
4. Why does the lecturer mention Ancient Greek?
A) To highlight its similarities to hieroglyphs
B) To explain how the decipherment process was possible
C) To suggest it was the most important of the three scripts
D) To describe the official language of ancient Egypt
Lecturer: One of the most important archaeological finds in history is undoubtedly the Rosetta Stone. Discovered in Egypt in 1799, this slab of rock provided the key to understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, a writing system that had been a mystery for centuries.
What made the stone so special? It was inscribed with the same decree in three different scripts: hieroglyphic, which was the formal script; Demotic, the common Egyptian script; and Ancient Greek.
Scholars at the time could still read Ancient Greek, so they could use the Greek text as a guide to decipher the two unknown Egyptian scripts. It was a long process, but it ultimately allowed us to read thousands of ancient Egyptian documents.
This unlocked a tremendous amount of information about their history, culture, and daily life that had been lost to time.
What made the stone so special? It was inscribed with the same decree in three different scripts: hieroglyphic, which was the formal script; Demotic, the common Egyptian script; and Ancient Greek.
Scholars at the time could still read Ancient Greek, so they could use the Greek text as a guide to decipher the two unknown Egyptian scripts. It was a long process, but it ultimately allowed us to read thousands of ancient Egyptian documents.
This unlocked a tremendous amount of information about their history, culture, and daily life that had been lost to time.
Highlights
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