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.
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