Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta stone, people thought Egyptian hieroglyphs were very pretty pictographs perhaps representing concepts perhaps something else.  The knowledge of how to read them had been lost for almost two thousand years.  When the Rosetta stone was found, it was immediately recognized as the key to unlocking the secrets within the long dead language of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Rosetta stone was found in mid July of 1799 by a young French officer.  He was in charge of the demolition of an ancient wall in Rashid, Egypt (known to Europeans as Rosetta) in their effort to extend the French fort. (The French needed protection from the British on land in Egypt because Lord Horatio Nelson had just demolished the French fleet at Aboukir Bay not far from the Alexandrian coast the year before.) As soon as the young officer saw the stone with hieroglyphs carved on the top part, some kind of ancient Arabic in the middle, and ancient Greek carved on the bottom, he immediately realized its importance.  He sent it to Cairo to be studied. It arrived in August of 1799, and prints of the stone quickly spread throughout scholarly Europe.  The race to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs was on.

It was thought that since the bottom third of the stone was written in ancient Greek and modern scholars had retained the ability to read ancient Greek, it should be easy to translate the hieroglyphs.  It proved not so easy after all since a large portion of the hieroglyphs was missing.  The top portion had broken off and had disappeared in some bygone age.  It would require true genius to translate it.  Fortunately, two geniuses rose to the challenge.  Of course, one was British and the other was French.

Though the French had found the Rosetta Stone, the British claimed it as a spoil of war after defeating the French in Egypt in 1801.  The French were left only with their copies of it.  Since the French and the English had always been pretty competitive.  It’s no surprise that they would be a little competitive about who would ultimately crack the code.

For the past 200 years, the Rosetta Stone has proudly resided in the British Museum. Though the French scholar Jean-François Champollion is given credit for the complete translation, the explanation card on the stone credits English physicist, Thomas Young, as the first to make a critical break through in its translation. He discovered some interesting things about the hieroglyphs not the least of which was that the pictures in the cartouches (personal names) were phonetic.  Then he lost interest in hieroglyphics, calling his achievements “the amusements of a few leisure hours.”

His findings were published in 1819 and read by Champollion, a coptic expert, who realized that in fact all the hieroglyphs were phonetic, not only the personal names.  He had learned Coptic, a language that survives only in the Egyptian Coptic church, because he believed that it was the nearest living language to that spoken by the Ancient Egyptians. He was a trained linguist and was able to trace Coptic back to earlier forms of Egyptian writing, and beyond, all the way back to the hieroglyphs.

Pushing the boundaries of knowledge has always been a team effort for the many generations humanity.  We advance so much farther and faster when we cooperate with each other.  None of us stands alone.  We all build on what has come before.  Sir Isaac Newton (the inventor of Calculus and other hard stuff) once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”  When we toast to giants, I think it needs to be with a giant bottle of champagne, like maybe a Nebuchadnezzar (15 Liters) What do you think? Cheers!

Tags: British Museum, corkey trivia, egypt, rosetta stone

Posted August 3, 2010 in Liane: Corkey Trivia
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