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kerjakeras4pp5 April 19, 2023 Comment

“The first people to look at the Rosetta Stone thought it would take two weeks to decipher, ” says Edward Dolnick, author of

. “It ended up taking 20 years.” Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos © The Trustees of the British Museum, Wikimedia Commons under public domain

When Jean-François Champollion, a 31-year-old Frenchman who’d dedicated his life to the study of ancient Egypt, burst into his brother’s Paris office on September 14, 1822, he made an emphatic declaration—“

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” (“I’ve got it!”)—then promptly collapsed. According to popular lore, the philologist, or scholar of historical languages, only recovered from his fainting spell five days later.

The dramatic nature of Champollion’s announcement was emblematic of his idiosyncratic character. (The scholar, says writer Edward Dolnick, was “an over-the-top, histrionic, melodramatic figure, always bursting with ecstasy or despondent in misery.”) But his reaction was also far from hyperbolic, considering the significance of the discovery in question. As Champollion revealed to a room of his peers nearly two weeks later, he’d solved one of history’s greatest mysteries: how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs and, by extension, unlock the secrets of the ancient civilization.

The key to this centuries-old dilemma was an unassuming slab of granodiorite unearthed in Egypt in July 1799. Dubbed the Rosetta Stone after the town where it was found, the stela fragment features versions of the same decree in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic (essentially a shorthand form of hieroglyphs) and ancient Greek.

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In theory, the juxtaposed inscriptions should’ve been easy to decipher, as scholars at the time knew ancient Greek and could therefore piece together the hieroglyphic translation based on the Greek message. “The first people to look at the Rosetta Stone thought it would take two weeks to decipher, ” says Dolnick, author of The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone. “It ended up taking 20 years.”

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger slab erected at an Egyptian temple in 196 B.C.E., during the reign of Ptolemy V, a Ptolemaic king of Macedonian Greek ancestry. Its surface is inscribed with a decree issued by a council of Egyptian priests on the anniversary of Ptolemy’s coronation.

Despite the stone’s later significance, the text itself is relatively mundane, listing the king’s accomplishments before reminding readers of his divinity and affirming his royal cult. (Read the full decree here.) The priests conclude their message by ordering that the decree be inscribed on stelae “in the writing of the words of the gods, and the writing of the books and in the writing of [the Greeks].” These copies, in turn, were distributed at temples across the kingdom.

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Developed around three millennia earlier, in 3100 B.C.E., hieroglyphs (the noun form of the word, as opposed to the adjective “hieroglyphic”) are pictorial symbols used to write the ancient Egyptian language. By Ptolemy’s time, some 3, 000 years after hieroglyphs’ creation, the elaborate script was mainly used by priests (hence the Rosetta Stone’s reference to “the words of the gods”), with the general public more often using the simpler Demotic. (For a sense of just how long ancient Egypt thrived, writes Dolnick, consider this: “Cleopatra came at the very end of Egypt’s imperial run, 13 centuries after King Tut, 20 centuries after the golden age of Egyptian literature, 26 centuries after the Great Pyramid.” To put it in another context, the reign of Cleopatra is closer to the year 2022 than it is to when the pyramids were built.)

As Ilona Regulski, a curator of Egyptian written culture at the British Museum, which has housed the Rosetta Stone since 1802, says, “Egypt was a very multicultural society at the time, … and those who could read and write were able to do so in more than one language. So it was quite common in that time to translate any kind of formal writing into other scripts, whether it was Egyptian to Greek or Greek to Egyptian.”

The council issued its decree in the midst of the Great Revolt (206 to 186 B.C.E.), a poorly documented uprising sparked by long-brewing tensions between the Greek Ptolemaic rulers and their Egyptian subjects. Egyptian veterans of a war spearheaded by Ptolemy V’s father “returned home unwilling to accept their role as second-class citizens and actively pushed for the return of Egyptian leadership, ” per Archaeology magazine. The Rosetta Stone references these events directly, detailing how Ptolemy, who succeeded his father around 204 B.C.E., captured an enemy town, “cut to pieces the rebels who were therein, and … made an exceedingly great slaughter among them.” Ebullient in its praise of the young king, the decree is essentially “a propaganda poster carved in stone, ” says Dolnick.

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At some point after its creation in 196 B.C.E., the Rosetta Stone was broken into pieces, leaving its inscriptions incomplete. Originally part of a taller slab, the surviving fragment contains 14 lines in hieroglyphic script, 32 in Demotic and 53 in ancient Greek. The top and bottom right sections of the stone remain unaccounted for despite archaeologists’ efforts to locate them.

Around 1470, builders constructing a fort a few miles northwest of the port town of Rashid, or Rosetta, incorporated the fragment into a wall. It remained there until July 1799, when a member of a French team tasked with rebuilding the now-dilapidated fort identified the stone as an object of significance. (Pierre-François Bouchard, the French officer in charge of the unit, is often credited with the discovery, but as Dolnick notes in

The French had arrived in Egypt a year earlier, with Napoleon Bonaparte landing his fleet of 400 ships and 54, 000 men outside Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Fresh off of a successful Italian campaign, Napoleon hoped to assert French trade interests in the Middle East, challenge Britain’s dominance in the region and gather information on Egypt’s rich history. As the then-general told his troops at the beginning of the Battle of the Pyramids, “Soldiers, from the height of these pyramids, 40 centuries look down upon you.”

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Napoleon initially enjoyed great success against the Mamluk and Ottoman armies then in control of the region. (The Mamluks seized power in Egypt in 1250 C.E. and remained highly influential even after their defeat by the Ottoman Empire in 1517.) But British troops led by Admiral Horatio Nelson soon curbed his ambitions, destroying or capturing the majority of France’s ships. Napoleon fled home to France in August 1799, leaving his men—including the 160 or so scholars tasked with documenting Egyptian culture—stranded abroad.

When the French finally surrendered to the English in 1801, they agreed to relinquish the ancient treasures they’d found, among them the Rosetta Stone. This “very curious stone, ” in the words of a London newspaper, arrived in England in February 1802 and went on view at the British Museum later that year. Today, two painted inscriptions on the slab’s sides testify to its colonial history: on the left, “Captured in Egypt by the British Army 1801, ” and on the right, “Presented by King George III.”

The scholars who set out to decipher the Rosetta Stone faced an array of challenges. Chief among them was the fact that hieroglyphs had fallen out of use some 1, 400 years prior, with the last known hieroglyphic inscription etched into a gateway around 400 C.E. The last known inscription in Demotic, the shorthand script that evolved from hieroglyphs, dates to just a few decades later, in 452 C.E. Over the intervening centuries, says Regulski, “the connection between hieroglyphs and the spoken language [of ancient Egyptian] was lost.” Ancient Egyptian itself became largely obsolete after the seventh century C.E., when Arabic started gaining traction in the region.

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Contrary to popular misconception, the Rosetta Stone isn’t a trilingual text. It’s a bilingual one with three separate scripts. Think of the hieroglyphs as a complicated form of calligraphy and the Demotic text as ordinary letters. Both are written in ancient Egyptian, but they look so different that observers initially thought they represented different languages. Instead, “the hieroglyphs … are a way of writing the Egyptian language in the same way that ‘ABC’ is a way of writing English, French or German, ” Dolnick explains.

As Dolnick notes, scholars soon realized the Rosetta Stone’s three scripts “said only roughly the same thing, as if three people had each described the same movie. So you couldn’t simply assume that the first word in one inscription corresponded to the first word in the next inscription.” (Some of these differences stemmed from the fact that the decree was “probably issued in Greek, then translated into Egyptian to give [it] a local veneer … by adding things [that] made it feel a bit more Egyptian, ” according to Regulski.)

Even if one could figure out a way to read the hieroglyphs, they’d likely have trouble piecing together the meaning of the sounds they found themselves uttering. “It would be as if English were a dead language thousands of years from now, ” says Dolnick, “and someone found a text and they figured out how to sound out the alphabet, and they read aloud ‘c-a-t.’ But how would they