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Sept. 27, 1822: Deciphering the Rosetta Stone Unlocks Egyptian History

1822: Jean-François Champollion shows a draft translation of the mysterious Rosetta stone and demonstrates to the world how to read the voluminous hieroglyphics left behind by the scribes of ancient Egypt.

The story of the Rosetta stone is one of coruscating intellects and petty rivalries, of ancient mysteries and quite modern imperial politics. The stone dates to 196 B.C., and was recovered in 1799 by a French soldier in Rosetta, aka Rashid, a port on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Discover is a noble word — the stone was part of a wall in a fort!

Despite being an Egyptian artifact, and despite the fact that it was recovered and ultimately translated by the French, the Rosetta stone currently resides in the British Museum, as it has done since 1802.

The importance of the Rosetta stone can’t be overstated: It enabled the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics, a skill which had been lost for more than a thousand years. It is a stele, or commemorative slab, announcing a cult of Ptolemy V, who was to be seen as divine.

Such an announcement would have been politically necessary for the 13-year-old Ptolemy, who had already been ruler for 8 years following the death of his parents at the hand of his father’s mistress. The child-king oversaw a land plagued with enemies without and within, and the decree was an attempt on the part of priests and the king to restore stability.

What was so helpful, from a translator’s perspective, about the Rosetta stone was the fact that the decree was written on the stele three times: in hieroglyphics (the formal communication medium of the priests), Egyptian demotic script (the everyday notation used by most of those who could read and write), and Greek (used by the administrative apparatus of Egypt during the Ptolemaic dynasty).

There were, in effect, two key breakthroughs in the translation of the Rosetta stone. The first was by an English polymath, Thomas “Phenomenon” Young (1773-1829), famous for such other discoveries as the wave properties of light, Young’s modulus, and numerous other researches in optics, engineering and medicine.

Young was able to discover inaccuracies in the late-18th-century understanding of demotic script, and, by 1814, to translate the demotic portion of the Rosetta stone. His most critical contribution, however, was to discover cartouches containing the phonetic representation of Greek names — notably the name of Ptolemy himself.

Young set aside his study. He was distracted by other research, and by his assent to the prevailing belief that hieroglyphics were exclusively logograms, or units of meaning rather than units of sound.

That left the second breakthrough to Champollion (1790-1832), a French linguist who had been obsessed with hieroglyphics from a very young age. Champollion continued Young’s research into cartouches, aided by his own extensive knowledge of Coptic, a form of Egyptian that uses the the Greek alphabet plus a few other signs to capture Egyptian sounds not otherwise represented in Greek.

Young had been waylaid by his belief that when cartouches were phonetic only when they represented foreign names, such as Ptolemy. In 1822, Champollion discovered conventional Egyptian names in cartouches from other documents, each with phonetic spellings, and he took up the Rosetta stone again.

Simon Singh explains Champollion’s method:

Champollion focused on a cartouche containing just four hieroglyphs: The first two symbols were unknown, but the repeated pair at the end signified ’s-s’. This meant that the cartouche represented ?-?-s-s….

Champollion wondered if the first hieroglyph in the cartouche, the disc, might represent the sun, and then he assumed its sound value to be that of the Coptic word for sun, ra. This gave him the sequence ra-?-s-s. Only one pharaonic name seemed to fit. Allowing for the omission of vowels and the unknown letter, surely this was Ramses.

This cartouche turned out to be the royal road to a full translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics, because, as Singh explains, it “showed that the scribes sometimes exploited the rebus principle, which involves breaking long words into phonetic components, and then using pictures to represent these components.”

He made this breakthrough Sept. 22, 1827, shouted “Je tiens l’affaire!” (“I’ve got it!”) to his brother and promptly fainted. He remained bedridden for five days.

Only then, on Sept. 27, was his famous report, the “Lettre à M. Dacier” read at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Paris.

The announcement of Champollion’s breakthrough was not the last word. The Rosetta stone was a flashpoint in Anglo-French conflict. Originally discovered during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, the stone, along with all other Egyptian antiquities discovered by the French, was surrendered to England as part of the Articles of Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801.

It was impossible, then, for Young and Champollion not to play nationalist roles, and to be championed by linguists and Egyptologists from their respective nations. While there can be no doubt that Young’s deciphering of the cartouches played a key role in Champollion’s discovery, the latter’s recognition of the more extensive phonetic underpinnings of hieroglyphics was a legitimately original breakthrough.

Modern research has shown that, as important as Young and Champollion’s research was, it emerged in dialogue with other famous linguists and Egyptologists, such as A.I. Silvestre de Sacy, who both taught Champollion and tipped off Young that cartouches might be an interesting place to look.

Like many treasures in the British Museum, there is controversy over the location and possession of the Rosetta stone. Egypt would like the stone back, while the museum believes its ownership is well-established.

Source: Various

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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