The Rosetta Stone, Courtesy of https://sketchplanations.com/the-rosetta-stone

Let me pose a question. What might connect ‘The Lead Shot Tower’ in Chester (which is 168 feet tall and now a listed monument) at a factory where I worked until 1982 with ‘The Rosetta Stone’?

Well, in 1799 the Shot Tower was built by the Walker family to produce shot for the muskets used in the Napoleonic Wars: in the same year Napoleon’s army looted the Rosetta Stone during his Egyptian Campaign.

When the British defeated the French, a British officer pinched it from the French officer who had stolen it in the first place.

The Greek writing was translated, not a lot later, by a French scholar which led to the understanding of the other two languages in which the same text was written in symbols on the stone.

What we can say is that it is entirely a consequence of the coincidental circumstances surrounding the movements of the Rosetta Stone  that the ancient hieroglyphs in ‘The Valley of the Kings’ could finally be read for the first time, and this in turn led to the formation of ‘Egyptology’.

We might wonder to what extent the circumstances of our coming to faith in Jesus Christ are themselves coincidences or God’s hand guiding the connections we make and resulting in consequences which we could never have imagined.

I know which I believe; how about you?

‘God is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine’  Ephesians 3:20                                                                                    

Dave Rowlands                                                                              

Picture from https://lightmoor.co.uk/books/an-illustrated-history-of-chester-leadworks/L8238