by Patrick Hunt
Alexandria was an amazingly vibrant hodgepodge of the old Egyptians mixed with Greeks, Macedonians, Africans, Semitic Asians and whoever else was attracted there by its cosmopolitan spirit soon after its founding. Greeks had been in Egypt for centuries, especially in the Nile Delta, trading and even writing Greek graffiti on old monuments and tombs. The first Greek colony in Egypt was Naukratis, founded at least four centuries before Alexander came along, but this new city of Alexandria was more than just a statement of conquest. It became synonymous with Alexander’s ideals of blending of East and West in what would later be termed Hellenism. Although rarely lodged in Alexandria and too busy leading his armies in the East, Alexander devoted vast resources to the city. He wanted it to be one that would bring the world together, somehow uniting very different cultures. It would be a triumph of beauty in planning and architecture, its broad avenues lined with gleaming white marble colonnades and reflecting pools. Alexandria soon boasted the world’s best library, the Library of Alexandria, and several temples serving a curious mix of religions that had elements of both old Egyptian and new Greek divinity and rituals. Because both the city of Alexandria and the Ptolemy conquerors were at least half Greek, Greek became one of the necessary spoken and written languages.
This biculturalism forced the old Egyptian priesthoods to either assimilate the Greek culture into their ancient religious system or die out. They chose survival and their scribes soon wrote Greek texts alongside the very traditional hieroglyphs, already thousands of years old, and the quick shorthand or cursive demotic text. These priests and scribes had even revolutionized ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, making them more phonetic on a one-to-one exchange basis like the Greek alphabet, instead of a jumble of arcane combinations of ideograms, phonograms and rebus elements, although the Rosetta Stone’s hieroglyphs are still a compendium of the former as well.
Details of the surprising text are not as important as their triplicity
Scribes for the hybridized Egyptian-Greek cults and state recorders serving several different constituencies of Egyptians and Greeks had to sometimes, although apparently not often, inscribe multilingual texts and decrees on stone to commemorate some event on the Alexandrian and Ptolemaic Egypt calendar. Why not write it in multiple languages so that the priests of both the Egyptian and the Greek temples could easily read it? We still do not know if the Rosetta Stone was a master text for less permanent, more perishable copies, or a single text unrecorded elsewhere. We do know that the hieroglyphs were translated from the Greek and not vice versa, and that the perhaps embarrassingly bureaucratic writing on this broken stone preserves the most mundane of texts. This is the background context to the Rosetta Stone, to this day the sole example of a triple language text from Egypt with sufficient detail to serve as the “key” to hieroglyphs.
The text on the Rosetta Stone is not as important as one might think; in fact, it is a rather mundane text called the Memphis Decree, which faithfully recorded details of the establishment of the royal cult as well as grain inventories and allotments. The nature of this decree was to help establish and confirm the royal cult of the boy king, Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205-180 BC). The stela or upright monument itself, probably 149 centimeters high before it was broken, has a traditional inscription dated to March 27, 196 BC. Thus the inscription records the decree when priests of Egypt formally put their strength behind Ptolemy, as he was only an adolescent of sixteen. The decree brought official backing for the king in a period of much unrest. In return for setting up a royal cult for the king, the priests would obtain favors from the king, including exemption from certain taxes. Thus the triple-script account on the Rosetta Stone is politically motivated.
Sharing known with unknown language makes it the most important document in history
Decoding ancient texts is a difficult task when there are few examples of the ancient writing to analyze and the language is a “dead” language not currently spoken. This is why, for example, our understanding of Minoan Linear A circa 1700 BC in Crete is still very tentative, because there just aren’t enough texts to compare. It is the same for the famous stamped clay Phaistos Disc from Crete discovered in the early twentieth century, since only one example exists, and debate still rages as to its meaning. Even Mayan hieroglyphs from Central America are not completely understood, even though for the more recent Mayan scripts, from around AD 300 to 800, remnants exist today in indigenous modern dialects such as Tzotzil and Quiche. In comparison, the Coptic language script—a melange of ancient Greek and Old Egyptian—in modern Egypt has also existed for several millennia, although the older Egyptian remnants have had longer to disappear from modern Coptic, and finding them was not enough to help linguists reconstruct Old Egyptian.
This mix of so-called dead languages is what sets the Rosetta Stone apart: the very fact that it also contained a form of late ancient Ptolemaic Greek that could still be read—“dead but not forgotten”—gave linguists a known text to help translate an unknown text (Egyptian hieroglyphs) that was both “dead and forgotten.” That it was inscribed also in triplicate form (Egyptian hieroglyph, Egyptian demotic and Ptolemaic Greek) made it even more valuable to decoding ancient Egyptian.
Decoding it has opened up ancient Egyptian language and texts
Being able to translate ancient Egyptian because of the Rosetta Stone has been a great boon to our knowledge of ancient history. In addition to viewing their art and monuments, we can now read their own Egyptian historians, decrees, religion, literature, science and medicine, technology and many other aspects of culture in their own language. We can see an artistic image and read the text that goes with it; we can “read” not only the physical structures and architecture but document the workforce that created them, since Egyptian records tell us such things as how many workmen, farmers, soldiers and stock animals were employed; and we can discover how many tons of stone and bushels of grain were produced. Taxation data, inventories and other administrative and economic data also provide us dates, reigns, contacts with other peoples and many other cultural events. Understanding ancient Egypt was impossible before 1822 when hieroglyphs could finally begin to be read again after almost two millennia. These forgotten historical data were only mysteries before Young and Champollion used the Rosetta Stone to decode the language of ancient Egypt. In other words, the whole culture has come alive since 1822 in ways that were previously unimaginable.
Its stone material has been misidentified for almost two centuries
Carol Andrews, for years a most valuable Egyptologist at the British Museum, used to joke that the great Wallis Budge, formidable keeper of the Egyptian Department at the museum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would label things once and never change his mind. This is what happened to the Rosetta Stone, labeled by Budge as basalt stone when all the evidence was against it. Living in London, by 1987 I had spent much time in the famous museum and I knew it wasn’t basalt. Carol Andrews often asked me questions about stone materials, as this was my doctoral research focus, and she was one of the first persons I told why it couldn’t be basalt. My Ph.D. dissertation supervisor, Dr. Dafydd Griffiths, at the Institute of Archaeology a few blocks away, agreed with me. At a conference on archaeological stone in November 1991 at the British Museum, I was finally given permission by the guards to wedge myself underneath the Rosetta Stone, displayed at the time on a base off the floor. There I could see its underside had quartz vein intrusions as well as a grain structure that was closer to granitoid material than anything else. It clearly wasn’t basalt. I showed this to other scholars at the conference, including Dietrich Klemm, considered an authority on Egyptian stone. Now the British Museum lists the material of the Rosetta Stone as granitoid, which is still an ambiguous category, but closer than basalt. Oddly enough, the original French records suggest it was something close to granite almost as far back as the original discovery, but perhaps Wallis Budge had not wanted to credit the French with anything!
It caused an internat
ional tug-of-war for years because its importance was immediately understood
As Brian Fagan has shown in The Rape of the Nile, Egypt was ripe for the taking around 1800 by European countries eager to establish collections from ancient empires. By 1799, Napoleon’s French expedition had already removed hundreds of tons of Egyptian antiquities, storing them in Cairo before shipping them off to France. Some of this material would form the basis of a great collection in the Louvre Museum, including objects like the eight-foot-high black statue of a seated Rameses II and the fourteen-foot-long Great Sphinx of Tanis, not to mention hundreds of other images of ancient Egypt. Such was the spoil collected in Egypt by the French, and other continental powers would soon follow their example.
Upon seeing the Rosetta Stone, General Menou at El-Rashid immediately understood how important it was—he stored it in his own tent and had it cleaned. At El-Rashid, the Rosetta branch of the Nile, the stone was not in its original position when Bouchard’s workers dug it out from the old wall. Because it had already been broken long since, it was clear it had been placed here much later, probably during or after the late Roman period in Egypt, around AD 500. The French tried to find other remaining fragments in the same river and port area in 1799, but they were unable to turn up any of the missing pieces, most likely because the original stone monument had been far removed from its original location even when originally broken. Even then any potential new fragments were considered “to be worth their weight in diamonds.”
The French scholars in the expedition carefully studied the Rosetta Stone and verified that not only was the bottom text Greek from around 200 BC, but, as mentioned, the middle text was found to be demotic, an almost cursive, shorthand form of Late Egyptian. Demotic was often used as an administrative language in tandem with Greek in Late Egypt at the time of the Ptolemies, circa 200 BC. The Rosetta Stone was taken to Cairo and placed under the curation of the French Institute of Egypt, where scores of French visitors hurried to view it, both scholars and military officers alike. Back in Egypt the stone was being used as a sort of printing plate, like a lithograph, inked and copied for distribution. A French newspaper, Courier d’Egypte, even announced its discovery in late 1799 as a possible “key to hieroglyphs,” and by fall of 1800 the scholars of the French Academy in Paris found that some knowledge about the Rosetta Stone had even reached the general populace there.
News of the discovery spread rapidly in French and soon British circles. What the French had feared about British intentions was soon to be realized. When the British successfully blockaded and defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, the Rosetta Stone was already one of the objects central to negotiations in turning over France’s recently acquired Egyptian antiquities to the new British conquerors. General Menou could have protected the Rosetta Stone by sending it out of Cairo to France earlier, but instead he’d had it transported to Alexandria, possibly because he secretly considered it his personal property. Menou was not on good terms with the scholars of the French Institute of Egypt and when the threat of British forces began to materialize in the blockade of the Nile, he retreated to Alexandria with the Rosetta Stone in his possession. The earlier chance of shipping it to France with the rest of the Egyptian antiquities was now lost, but Menou had probably delayed in anguish, knowing that if he sent it back to France he would have lost any control over it. The few scholars left in his entourage became the Rosetta Stone’s temporary curators, under his watchful eye, and they wrapped it in packing to hide it from the British forces who were overrunning Egypt. The retreating Napoleonic French expedition were doing their best to evacuate Egypt with whatever they could keep from the British but now General Menou had waited too long.
The British must have had spies in shipping because they knew the Rosetta Stone had not left Egypt. From the highest British orders on down, the mandate was to obtain the Rosetta Stone at all costs. As spoils of war, the British general John Hutchinson required all antiquities to be turned over for his safekeeping. Negotiations for the British in 1800 were conducted by a clergyman, Edward Clarke, and the diplomat-collector Sir William Hamilton. The British had tracked the Rosetta Stone directly to General Menou. In his book Cracking Codes, Richard Parkinson relates the anecdote that upon being forced to give up the Rosetta Stone, General Menou could be heard bellowing from his tent, “Never has the world been so pillaged!” This apparently amused the British because to them Menou was the epitome of an official looter.
The French, especially General Menou both as an individual but also now suddenly representing his country in protest, were understandably very upset to part with it as the Rosetta Stone had already become a French national treasure, not because of anything aesthetic but because of its triple language texts, whose significance, if not meaning, was already clear. The Rosetta Stone would remain a focal point in nationalistic competition over Egyptian matters between the French and British for decades, revived in the decoding race of the Rosetta Stone by Champollion and Young, rivals whose roles have been promoted or downplayed by both French and British historians.
The tale of its deciphering is a great detective story shared by rival geniuses
The Rosetta Stone was firmly ensconced in the British Museum by 1802 in a royal decree by George III, but its casts and rubbings, some of them taken back in 1800 in Egypt, proliferated in collections such as the Vatican’s and in centers of European learning including Uppsala and Leiden and even Philadelphia’s Philosophical Society, where academicians and scholars tried (unsuccessfully for the most part) to make sense of the hieroglyphs. In the next few years, several linguists who could already read the Greek were able to make some headway in translation. Among them were the Orientalist and linguist Baron Silvestre de Sacy, who was able to decipher the demotic name for Ptolemy, and the Swedish scholar J. H. Ackerblad in 1802, neither of whom receive sufficient credit for their linguistic advances in reading hieroglyphs.
The main figure in this almost mythic story is usually Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), who had already learned eight languages, including Hebrew, Greek and Latin, by age sixteen. He was held in such high esteem even before publishing his Rosetta Stone studies in 1822 that he became a professor at the Lycée of Grenoble at age nineteen. The other figure of at least equal brilliance is Thomas Young (1773-1829), a British medical doctor, linguist and physicist of optics who was one of the first in modern times to formulate and use logical principles of what would become cryptography. Like Champollion, Young had mastered at least seven languages as an adolescent, and he was widely regarded as a genius scientist and universal scholar (called “Phenomenon Young”) and Champollion a genius linguist. Neither Champollion nor Young was working directly with the Rosetta Stone but instead with copies. The fact that one man was French and the other British heightened the nationalistic tension and competition in this race to decode the Rosetta Stone. Most likely because France could never forgive Britain for taking the Rosetta Stone from them by force after French discovery, French historians to this day usually mention only their countryman Champollion in the decipherment and are very grudging about giving the British scientist Young any of the credit that he is rightly due.
Champollion’s older brother Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac (1778-1867), a professor of Greek at the University of Grenoble, had much earlier, in 1802, encouraged twelve-year-old Jean-François to study the inscription of the Rosetta Stone if he wanted to make a lasting mark on Egyptology. Jean-François eventually became a student of Silvestre de Sacy at the College de France in Paris and there he learned Coptic, the latest ancient version of Egyptian (using mostly Greek letters) surviving from the Roman period. Under de Sacy’s tutelage, at age sixteen in 1806, the brilliant young Jean-François Champollion gave a paper to the Society of Sciences and Arts in Grenoble showing that Coptic was a remnant of Old Egyptian and the last language of Old Egypt. Thus Champollion gradually homed in on the old hieroglyphic language of Egypt over the course of at least a decade. Champollion was almost fana
tically supportive of Napoleon in his political outlook, so it was no surprise that Napoleon signed the official paperwork making Champollion a doctor in 1809, which was an unusual elevation outside of and above the normal academic bureaucracy.
In 1814, when he was twenty-four, Champollion wanted to have a better copy of the Rosetta Stone “lithograph” since his older sources, taken from the earliest French and British copies of its text, did not quite match up. He began correspondence with the brilliant Thomas Young, who was forty-one years old, seventeen years his senior, and served as the foreign secretary to the Royal Society. Champollion requested verification of certain passages. The usually generous Young quickly obliged but with not much more than was necessary.
In 1815, Baron de Sacy warned Thomas Young against his former student Champollion in a letter, suggesting that Young should guard his original research more carefully, saying:
I think, Monsieur, that you are further ahead [than Champollion] and that you can read a considerable part of the Egyptian hieroglyphic text. But if I had one piece of advice to give you, it would be to not communicate your discoveries too much to M. Champollion. It could transpire that he might then claim to have been first.