The most notable achievement for the Philomathean Society in its first fifty years was the 1858 publication of the Philomathean Rosetta Stone Report, the first complete English translation of the Rosetta Stone. Philo members Henry Morton, Charles Hale, and S. Huntington Jones took nearly a year to complete this work. Their work met with worldwide praise and recognition, resulting in such high demand that publication quickly went into a second edition.In 1988, the British Museum, home of the Rosetta Stone, bestowed the honor of including the Philomathean Rosetta Stone Report in its select bibliography of the most important works ever published on the Rosetta Stone. But, even though this event played such a large role in the history of the Society, few members or guests have seen a full copy of the report.
Fortunately for us, during the Moderatorship of Andrew Daniel Trister (Φ '02?), the Society took an copy of the Report that was falling apart to the Rare Book Library who graciously made an electronic copy of the Report.
The Report can be seen on the Penn Libraries’ Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image (SCETI) here: http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/printedbooksNew/index.cfm?TextID=rosetta
I encourage you all to see it. It is beautifully lithographed with Egyptian-style designs in colour by Henry Morton with the authors' handwritten text.
Here is the first page of the Report:
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