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.
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| 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.
