This is interesting: where did the name “Rosetta” come from and what does ancient Egypt have to do with it

The name of Apple’s operating system for Macs doesn’t make any special sense. You can try to draw one to the other and unusual symbolism in a leopard or in the names of different reserves, but often a name is just a name.

However, sometimes Apple marketers find inspiration and come up with a name that fits the product perfectly and has deep meaning. This is what happened with Rosette, part of the macOS System Compliance, the compliance requirements of Apple computers of various architectures.

We know this name because, since 2020, Rosetta 2 has helped run applications and programs written for Intel architecture on Macs with M1 and newer processors.

The name “Rosetta” from the court to … stone. A very old stone that took on a huge role in the exploration of ancient Egypt.

What is the Rosetta Stone

This is what the Rosetta Stone looks like. An artifact that helped decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In 1799, in Egypt, not far from the city of Rosetta (now called Rashid), a piece of a wall was dug out, densely inscribed with ancient hieroglyphs.

The text itself was just a letter of thanks, which in 196 BC. e. the Egyptian priests addressed Ptolemy V. There is a lot of flattery, all praise and in general the text can be placed in one line “thank you for being you”.

However, the most important discovery was that the text was written at two levels – ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek. At that time, scholars were already well versed in the ancient Greek language, so textual comparison served as a starting point for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

At the presentation in 2006, one of the slides of this stone was even indicated as a reference to the named Rosetta.

A piece of the wall, revealed by the Rosetta Stone, helped to translate incomprehensible hieroglyphs and recognize information. Exactly the same for the basics of modern Rosetta in Apple computers – it translates new applications that are incomprehensible to M1 processors. So it’s all very logical.

Since 1802, the Rosetta Stone has been found in the British Museum. Texts with it do not meet any riddles and this artifact has only historical value.