Ancient Stone War
In July 1799, one of the armies of the French Republic under General Napoleon Bonaparte was in Egypt. The French hoped to turn it into a colony, and in order to gain a foothold, troops prepared fortifications throughout the country. Military engineer Pierre Bouchard led the restoration work at Fort Julien, near the city of Rosetta (now called Rashid) in the Nile Delta.
Suddenly, among the stones broken from the wall, the engineer noticed an unusual slab, one side of which was covered with inscriptions.
Bouchard was a scientist, not a martinet, and a member of the Commission of Science and Art that accompanied the French expedition to Egypt to study this ancient land, then little known to Europeans. Archaeological research was one of the priorities, so Bouchard reported the find to the command and handed it over for examination.
On July 19, 1799, commissioner Michel Lancret made a short report on the stone. In it, he wrote that of the three texts, the upper one was written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle one in an unusual script similar to Syriac, and the lower one in ancient Greek, and was probably the same text in three different forms.
Soon after, linguists who participated in the expedition realized that the middle text, like the one above, was written in ancient Egyptian, but not in hieroglyphs, but in demotic script: a cursive, simplified, “common” sign system. Then the Rosetta Stone The key to deciphering ancient Egyptian texts.
Egyptian civilization did not leave living heirs, carriers of culture. The Coptic people are considered descendants of the ancient Egyptians, but after the Arab conquest they first abandoned their own alphabet based on demotic writing, and then the language itself practically disappeared. The tradition of writing in hieroglyphs disappeared much earlier, at the end of the 4th century, when the Roman Emperor Theodosius I closed all pagan temples and dispersed the last priests, the guardians of ancient knowledge.
Example of Demotic writing on the Rosetta Stone
World History Archives/Global Look Press
In 1801, the British defeated French forces in Egypt and began besieging their last stronghold, Alexandria. Surrender talks began, and the British, who wanted to give their country the upper hand in historical discovery, demanded that all ancient Egyptian findings be handed over to them.
The French responded that they would rather burn them or drown them at sea than surrender them to the enemy, and demanded that the antiquities and research materials be recognized as the personal property of the scientists.
As a result, the parties reached a compromise: the French gave the British 17 of the most important finds, but kept everything else, including notes and drawings. The intensity of passions was so great that the Rosetta Stone was secretly transferred to the British army so that it would not be stolen by French soldiers and hidden. As a result, the find ended up in the British Museum, where it remains to this day, but from a scientific point of view, France lost nothing: a copy of the text on the stone was delivered to Paris.
Decoding
In modern times, Egyptian writings were surrounded by an air of mysticism. Some believed that the papyrus texts revealed sacred secrets, while others believed that the symbols had magical meaning. This was often used by scammers and charlatans.
For example, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, allegedly used ancient Egyptian sources. He published a “translation” of a book written by the biblical patriarch Abraham from the ancient Egyptian original. Later, scientists proved that the “original” was a common ancient Egyptian funerary text designed to help the deceased attain eternal life, and that the “Book of Abraham” was a plagiarism of the King James Bible, diluted with Smith’s own fantasies.
Rosetta Stone in the British Museum in London
Daniel Kalker/Global Look Press
But the fight against charlatans is an insignificant part of what the Rosetta Stone gave to the world, which became a real portal to the ancient world.
The stone took several decades to be fully deciphered because of the complex problems. Therefore, the scholars of the early 19th century spoke ancient Greek and should theoretically have been able to read the inscription underneath. But they could not overcome the bureaucratic-priestly jargon and in general the text was different from the language of, for example, the Bible or the Greek philosophers.
For a long time, linguists could not identify even individual letters or symbols in the demotic text, but the main attention of researchers was concentrated on the most important and mysterious – the hieroglyphic inscription.
Scientists initially had nothing to hold on to when working on it, and besides, they started from the erroneous assumption that each hieroglyph represented a word. However, a superficial acquaintance with Chinese letters led linguist Sylvester de Sacy to think that the Egyptians were forced to write the names of foreign people not “in pictures”, but phonetically, syllable by syllable. In addition, researchers of Egyptian monuments have long noticed that some hieroglyphs look like they are surrounded by ovals – they are called cartouches. It was believed that proper names were circled by cartouches to distinguish them from the rest of the text.
Egyptian cartridges
Global Perspective Press
Comparing these two facts, de Sacy suggested a simple way to the English encyclopedist Thomas Young, who was working on the decryption: find the cartouches in the text, recognize the Greek names in them and identify the phonetic signs. Young succeeded – he found the phonetic record of Ptolmes – the name of the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled the country since the campaigns of Alexander the Great. The scientist also noticed that the phonetic symbols he discovered have analogues in demotic writing, although previously it was thought that these two systems were completely unrelated.
Cartouche of the Ptolemies
Young made a breakthrough but could not go any further. In 1814 he presented his ideas to Jean-François Champollion, who became famous as the discoverer of ancient Egyptian writings. Eight years later they bore fruit. Champollion saw a copy of a hieroglyphic inscription on one of the ancient Egyptian steles, on which could be seen not only the word Ptolmes, but also Cleopatra.
An idea immediately came to his mind, and he almost took it to the next world: while explaining his theory to his brother, Champollion shouted “I understand!” and then lost consciousness.
“The fourth letter of the hieroglyphic cartouche of Cleopatra, a type of flower with a curved stem, corresponds to the letter O in the Greek name of this queen. This is actually the third character of Ptolemy’s name. The fifth sign of Cleopatra’s name, which is in the shape of a parallelogram and is assumed to represent the letter P, is also the first sign of Ptolemy’s hieroglyphic name. <...> Thus, the signs of these two cartouches, analyzed phonetically, together gave us twelve signs corresponding to eleven consonants, vowels or vowels of the Greek alphabet: Α, ΑΙ, Ε, Κ, Λ, Μ, Ο, Π, Ρ, Σ , T”, – he reported in his work “Letter to Mr. Dasier”.
The scientist noticed that the Egyptians used a hieroglyphic sign for foreign words, which (initially) denoted a word that sounded at least partially similar. For example, the hieroglyph “hawk”, denoting life or spirit (ahe or ahi), began to denote the sound “A”. Finally, Champollion made another important observation about Egyptian texts: “This is a complex system of writing figuratively, symbolically and phonetically at the same time, in the same text, the same expression, even the same word.” .
This allowed the researcher to read the names of many pharaohs on dozens of monuments and steles and to begin deciphering the Royal Papyrus of Turin, which lists Egyptian rulers. This became the basis of ancient Egyptian chronology and all of scientific Egyptology.
The decisive role of the Rosetta Stone ended there. The hieroglyphic inscription was only partially preserved, as the stone was split, and later the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs continued on the basis of many other papyri. Modern linguists can read the ancient Egyptian language much worse than the priests, and the main problem is the paucity of surviving inscriptions, not their decipherment.
Long live our great pharaoh
No matter how great the role of the Rosetta Stone in history, it is interesting that the text carved on it is incredibly dull. It was written in 196 BC. e. in the city of Memphis during the period of Greek domination and expresses gratitude to the new pharaoh Ptolemy V, revealing one of his decrees.
“His Majesty, King of the South and the North Ptolemy, the ever-living, beloved Bird, the self-manifested god, the lord of beauty, received supreme power from his father…” – and then the numerous commandments and achievements of God. the ruler are listed. He donated a large amount of gold and grain to the temples. He cut taxes. He forgave the debts to the royal court and declared amnesty for prisoners. He promised that boatmen would not be forcibly assigned to serve in the navy. In the eighth year of his reign, he stationed troops at the mouths of the canals to protect and monitor them from the extraordinary rise of the Nile waters. He coped magnificently with the rebels; in a word, he was a perfect ruler.
Image of the Rosetta Stone
Global Perspective Press
Since the new pharaoh was extremely good and generous, the priests promised in return that the king’s birthday and coronation would be celebrated annually, and that all the priests of Egypt would worship him along with the other gods. The text concludes with a call for a copy to be placed in every temple in the “language of the gods” (hieroglyphs), the “language of documents” (Demotic), and the “Greek language.” The Ptolemies and their administration
In short, mystics and romantics were disappointed, because for them the ancient texts turned out to be no more fun than going to the tax office or visiting the Civil Service.
What are you thinking?
Source: Gazeta
Barbara Dickson is a seasoned writer for “Social Bites”. She keeps readers informed on the latest news and trends, providing in-depth coverage and analysis on a variety of topics.