The Rosetta Stone - III of III

We know far more about Egypt than we do about any other ancient culture. We know it because the Egyptians themselves told us — they wrote it down — and we can read their inscriptions and letters and stories. We know all that because the Rosetta Stone was deciphered. The deciphering of hieroglyphs gave voices to pharaohs and schoolboys and merchants and travelers who died thirty centuries ago.  Messages cut into monuments long ago, or drawn on temple walls, remain sharp and distinct to this day. Countless papyrus texts survive. 

Ancient Egyptians recognized the importance of writing. One temple inscription from about the same era as the Rosetta Stone praised the gods who “created writing in the beginning ”and thereby “caused memory to begin.” Thanks to this divine gift, “the heir speaks with his forefathers” and “friends can communicate when the sea is between them, and one man can hear another without seeing him.”

Engraved inscriptions dealt largely with kings and gods, but messages on papyrus tended toward the mundane and practical. “Please make me a new pair of sandals,” reads one note from around 1200 BC. Another from the same era asks, “Why haven’t you answered my message? I wrote to you a week ago!” One junior scribe complained to his supervisor, in around 1240 BC, that he was mistreated and taken for granted. “I am like a donkey to you. If there is some work, bring the donkey…. If there is some beer, you do not look for me, but if there is work you do look for me.

An aggrieved mother railed against her ungrateful children, She declared in her will, in around 1140 BC, “I am a free woman of the land of Pharaoh. I brought up eight children and gave them everything suitable to their station. But I have grown old, and they have not looked after me. Whoever of them has aided me, I will leave my property. But he who has neglected me, I will not aid him.”

Most papyruses provided glimpses of everyday life. Many ancient Egyptian texts have an unsettling, almost-familiar-but-not-quite quality. Writers describe emotions that we recognize at once but make their points with images that remind us, with a jolt, that it is in a different culture long ago. Scraps from marriage contracts, horoscopes, and steamy novels turned up, and so did an unknown play by Sophocles and snippets of poems by Sappho.

A poem from the era of King Tut, around 1300 BC, described the obstacles that confront a pair of young lovers: “My beloved is on yonder side / A width of water is between us / And a crocodile waits on the sandbank." One Egyptian scribe scrawled his frustration on a piece of papyrus in 2000 B.C. “Would I had phrases that are not known, new language that has not been used, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken."

An essay written in 2400 BC passed along detailed, and still relevant, advice in the how-to-get-along-with-your-boss genre. “If you are a guest at a table of one who is greater than you, laugh when he laughs. That will please his heart, and what you do will be acceptable.” Egyptian folktales featured princesses locked in towers, and heroes granted three wishes, and even a distraught king who sent messengers across the land to locate the woman whose beautiful slipper he’d happened to find. Sound familiar? 

But what if the writing survives, but the knowledge of how to read it does not? Egyptians spoke a language that’s dead to us, he might have noted, and they devised a script that looks odd and elaborate, and held beliefs we can only guess at, and lived in a world completely foreign to us. But a black slab with three different scripts and dogged work by a genius helped us read their writing. Champollion had made immense progress but it was a huge undertaking. Given time, he would surely have sorted things out. But he didn’t have time. He died in 1832 at the age of 41.

The task of carrying on would be left to a series of successors, most notably a scholar named Richard Lepsius who styled himself “the German Champollion.” It was Lepsius who found ironclad proof that Champollion’s deciphering was correct. In 1866 Lepsius was part of an archaeological team working in Egypt which discovered a counterpart of the Rosetta Stone called the Canopus stone. Till then nobody could tell with certainty that Champollion’s deciphering work was not an elaborate self-delusion.

Until Lepsius unearthed it, no one had any idea that it existed. This new stone contained a long passage in Greek and the same passage written out in demotic and in hieroglyphs. The message, which was composed a few decades earlier than the Rosetta Stone, is nothing special but the importance of the Canopus Stone (it was named for the city where it was written) was that its text differed from that of the Rosetta Stone. Why was that crucial? 

Now you could put Champollion directly to the test — start with the hieroglyphic text on the Canopus Decree and translate it à la Champollion, and compare the result with the Greek translation on Canopus itself. Experts did just that. The match was nearly perfect.

The Rosetta Stone - II of III

When the Rosetta Stone was first discovered, it was thought that the hieroglyphs would be deciphered in two weeks. As it turned out, it took twenty years. One cause of the troubles was that the three inscriptions turned out not to be word-for-word translations of one another. They do match up but in an imprecise manner like three peoples’ summaries of the same movie. Moreover scripts can run left to right, like English, or right to left, like Hebrew and Arabic, or top to bottom, like Chinese and Japanese. The symbols appeared without a break.  How could anyone know where one word ended and the next began (if they were words at all)?

Jean-François Champollion, the man who was destined to decipher the hieroglyphs, was born in 1790. By all accounts, he was a child prodigy. When he was five years old, he learned how to read by comparing a list of words he had learned by heart with the written text. He was barely seven years old when he first heard the magical name of Egypt. 

When Champollion was 11, Jean-Baptiste Fourier, the famous mathematician and physicist, had a conversation with him. Fourier was so taken by his intelligence that he invited him to his home, and showed him his Egyptian collection. The little boy was enchanted by hieroglyphic inscriptions on stone tablets. “Can anyone read them?” he asked. Fourier shook his head. “I am going to do it,” little Champollion announced with absolute certainty. “In a few years I will be able to. When I am big.” 

Champollion explored the most esoteric topics. At the age of twelve, he wrote his first book, History of Famous Dogs. At thirteen he began to learn Arabic, Syrian, Chaldean, and Coptic. He studied textual excerpts from the Zend, Pahlavi, and Parsi. Using every source he could lay hands on, in the summer of 1807 Champollion, then seventeen years old, drew up the historical chart of the kingdom of the Pharaohs.

When he applied to a college, the authorities asked him to write a paper on a subject of his own choosing. He wrote a whole book for them: Egypt under the Pharaohs. On September 1, 1807 he read the introduction to this projected work to an assembly of students and teachers. The professors were overwhelmed to such a degree that on the spot they elected the boy to join them on the faculty. And so overnight Champollion was graduated from student to teacher.

He studied all the Oriental languages trying to understand their idiomatic developments. He wrote to his brother asking for a Chinese grammar, “for amusement”. He learned to speak Arabic so perfectly that he sounded like a native speaker. Through books alone, he acquired an extensive knowledge of Egypt. He spoke and wrote Coptic so well — “I speak Coptic to myself,” he said — that for practice he kept journals in Coptic. (Coptic was the only language providing a link with the Old Egyptian. The Coptic tongue had actually been spoken in Upper Egypt as late as the seventeenth century.)

A matter that kept occupying him was the Rosetta Stone but he kept holding himself back because he thought he was not prepared enough for such a big task. His first attempt to decipher the stele in his late teens enabled him to find the correct values for an entire row of letters. Then he got the horrendous news that that the hieroglyphs had been deciphered. He was relieved when he examined the proofs and realized that it was nonsense. 

In 1821 he published a monograph where he outlined the rudiments of a successful decoding method. The dominant tendency for centuries was to look for a purely symbolic meaning in the pictures.  Champollion showed how far from the truth this was. Egyptian writing actually had developed far beyond the original symbolism. One might think that the discovery of the Rosetta Stone would have put an end to wild guessing, but just the opposite proved to be the case. 

All manner of cabalistic, astrological, and gnostic doctrines were attributed to them, as well as agricultural, mercantile, and administrative allusions to practical life. Biblical quotations were discovered in them, even an antediluvian literature, not to mention excerpts from the Chaldean, Hebrew, and Chinese. “It was as if the Egyptians,” Champollion remarks, “had nothing to express in their own language.” Champollion sat unmoved among these reworks, patiently ordering, comparing, testing, slowly climbing the long hill.

Champollion hit on the idea that the hieroglyphic pictures were “letters”. Once he had grasped basic principles, he saw that decipherment must begin with the names of the kings. But why with the names of Egyptian kings? In the hieroglyphic section of the text was a group of signs enclosed in an oval ring which came to be known as a cartouche. Perhaps these ovals were special? Perhaps they signaled that the hieroglyphs they enclosed were noteworthy in some way (as italics or bold type instructs us to pay particular attention to certain words).

Cartouche

It seemed reasonable to suppose that these cartouches, since they were the only signs in the text showing evidence of special emphasis, might contain the Egyptian word for the king’s name. One should then be able to pick out the letters of the name Ptolemy from the Greek text and so correlate the eight hieroglyphic signs with eight letters. (In Greek, each letter is sounded individually; there are no silent letters. Greek speakers pronounce the P in Ptolemy.) 

Much of the work till this point was done by another genius called Thomas Young. But from this point onwards, Champollion raced ahead. By sheer luck, he got hold of the inscription on the Obelisk of Philæ, which was taken to England in 1821. This obelisk bore a message also written in hieroglyphics and Greek. And here again the name Ptolemy was framed in a cartouche, as was also another unfamiliar group of hieroglyphs that through comparison with the Greek were shown to be the Egyptian word for Cleopatra.

The key bit of good fortune was that Ptolemy and Cleopatra contained several letters in common, namely P, T, O, L and E.  Champollion had just assigned hieroglyphs to P, T, O, and L, based on the Rosetta Stone’s Ptolemy cartouche. Now he looked to see if those hieroglyphs turned up in the right place in the new cartouche. Substituting the letters from Ptolemy, this new cartouche read: _ L E O P _ T _ _. 

With this, he found new letters to assign to the hieroglyphs — the ones corresponding to the sounds c, r, and a — to add to his collection. Then he looked at other inscriptions and other bits of papyrus, searching for more cartouches. With persistence, mis-steps, frustration and inspired guesses, he found the key to the hieroglyphs and with it, the key to all the locked doors of Egyptian antiquity. (The whole story is related in Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick.)

(Why are inspired guesses required? A script can have numerous complications. Consider a person who has no idea about English. Is it read from right to left or from left to right? There are synonyms, homonyms, figures of speech, etc. 'Bank' could mean different things depending on the context. How to interpret 'She gave him the cold shoulder'? There are capital and small letters. How to know that 'cap' and 'CAP' mean the same thing? There are many punctuation marks.)

The Rosetta Stone - I of III

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the British Museum. The term "Rosetta Stone" is often used to refer to the crucial clue that opens up a new field of knowledge. It is said that the spectrum of the hydrogen atoms has proven to be the Rosetta Stone of modern physics. The flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been called the "Rosetta Stone of flowering time". A gamma-ray burst (GRB) found in conjunction with a supernova has been called a Rosetta Stone for understanding the origin of GRBs.

The bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins that allowed initial progress towards deciphering the Brahmi script, thus unlocking ancient Indian epigraphy, have been described as "little Rosetta stones". I had written in my blog that the piece of paper on which Jaya quickly scribbled down the letters of the alphabet became the Rosetta Stone for interpreting my dumb charades. So, what exactly is this Rosetta Stone? 

The story begins in 1798 when Napoleon sailed to Egypt with a large force. Though Napoleon’s expedition was unsuccessful militarily, it started a scientific examination of its antiquities that continues to this day. Napoleon had taken one hundred and seventy five “learned civilians” to Egypt. They included astronomers, geometers, chemists, mineralogists, Orientalists, technicians, painters, and poets. They brought along a large library, containing practically every book on the land of the Nile available in France, and also dozens of crates of scientific apparatus and measuring instruments.

These intellectuals brought back with them several plaster models, memoranda of all kinds, transcripts, drawings, and collections of animal, plant, and mineral specimens, several sarcophagi and twenty-seven pieces of carved stone, mostly fragments of statuary. Included in these findings was a stele (an upright stone slab typically bearing an inscription) made of polished black basalt, bearing an inscription in three different forms of writing. The heavy plaque became famous as the Rosetta Stone, key to the mysteries of Egypt.

A team of French soldiers had been assigned to rebuild a broken-down fort in Rashid, in the Nile delta. (The French called the town Rosetta.) Sources attribute a man called Dhautpoul or Bouchard with the discovery of Rosetta Stone. In actual fact, it was dug up by some unknown soldier. Somehow he seems to have recognized its importance. Or, he was superstitious and mistook the signs on the stone for witchcraft, so creating a disturbance that brought Bouchard’s attention to the slab. Beneath the dust and dirt on the stone’s dark surface, you could just make out some strange marks. Could this be something?

But in September 1801, upon the capitulation of Alexandria, France had to hand over to the English the conquered regions of Upper Egypt, and with them the expedition’s collection of Pharaonic antiquities. By the instructions of George III, the pieces were placed in the British Museum. The French felt that their whole year’s work was lost. Then it was realized that every single thing in the vast collection had been faithfully copied. Enough material would reach Paris to occupy the minds of a whole generation of scholars.

For Europeans, Egypt conjured up a hodgepodge of beauty (Cleopatra!) and grandeur (the pyramids!) and mystery (the Sphinx!) and some shivery horror (mummies!). That awe extended to hieroglyphs, Egypt’s ancient and imposing system of writing. Before the Rosetta Stone yielded its secrets, the mystery of the hieroglyphs seemed out of reach. Egypt’s monuments, tombs, temples, obelisks, papyrus sheets, the caskets that enclosed mummies, and even the mummies’ bandages were covered with elaborate picture-writing that no one knew how to decipher.

When, occasionally, scholars attempted interpretation, it was wrong. No one had any notion how to make empiric, concrete explanations. The hieroglyphs were simply unreadable. People were introduced to an entirely new world but its inner relationships, and significance were a mystery. Was it possible to decipher the hieroglyphics? De Sacy, the great Parisian Orientalist, said that “the problem is too complicated, scientifically insoluble.” Here is where the Rosetta Stone comes in. 

It was about the size of a table top, three feet nine inches in length, two feet four and a half inches in breadth, and eleven inches in thickness. Its jagged top showed that it was a fragment of a larger original. One side of the heavy stone was covered with inscriptions in three distinct scripts. At the top of the stone were fourteen lines of hieroglyphs, drawings of circles and stars and lions and kneeling men. That section was incomplete. Judging by the length of the other two inscriptions, about half the hieroglyphs are missing. 

In the stone’s middle section was a longer section of simple curves and curlicues, thirty-two lines altogether. These looked like letters from some unknown script or perhaps symbols from a code, but  not like the pictures in the hieroglyphic section. It would turn out that the middle inscription was a sort of shorthand that had developed because hieroglyphs were too elaborate for everyday writing. It was called Demotic. The third set of marks of fifty-four lines, below the other two was Greek and  was instantly recognizable. It was not quite easy to read, because it was written more like a legal document than an everyday note, but it was easy enough. 

The Rosetta Stone

From the Great section, it could be seen that the message recorded a decree of the Egyptian priesthood, issued in 196 B.C., praising Ptolemy Epiphanus, who was the Pharaoh at that time, for benefacial acts. The very arrangement of the columns suggested that all three parts of the inscription contained the same text. Once the Greek inscription had been properly translated, it seemed unlikely there would be much difficulty in establishing a connection between the hieroglyphic signs and the Greek words. The best minds of the day applied themselves to the task but failed to crack the code.