How the Rosetta Stone yielded its secrets

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/29/how-the-rosetta-stone-yielded-up-its-secrets-edward-dolnick-the-writing-of-the-gods

by fortran77 • 5 years ago

124 61 5 years ago

newyorker.com

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 5 years ago

Egypt fell to Rome in 30 B.C., after Caesar Augustus (at that time still called Octavian) defeated the forces of Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium,

Actually, the fall of Egypt is much earlier. Nectanebo II in 342 BC was the last native ruler of Egypt (and even he was part of a rebel dynasty that ruled for around 40 years after successfully revolting against the Persians who had conquered Egypt under Cambyses in the 500's.

The Rosetta Stone, was probably the single greatest archeological discovery to date. It opened up the written history of arguably one of the oldest civilizations in the world and which was throughout much of history either one of or involved with the greatest empires in history.

User23• 5 years ago

the last native ruler of Egypt

What exactly does "native" mean in this context? The entire Mediterranean coast was the equivalent of a highway off-ramp for as long as boats have been a thing, which is far longer ago than the 4th century BC. I'm no Egyptologist, but given that there were 32 different dynasties (supposedly), I assume some "foreign" conquest must have been involved on more than one occasion in the millennia the Egyptian kingdoms existed. It's an area where Internet search provides no quality results, so if you can help clarify I'd greatly appreciate it.

barry-cotter• 5 years ago

This was the last time that someone whose high culture was Egyptian ruled Egypt. After that Egypt was ruled by people who spoke a different language and looked outside Egypt for cultural touchstones. Cleopatra was the first Ptolemy to speak Egyptian. Until the Arabs conquered it from the Romans it was ruled by Greek speakers.

estaseuropano• 5 years ago

If I remember my history well Egypt was basically like China: a more or less coherent empire that was however many times conquered and reconquered or had internal political takeovers. So you may be right that 342 is a better date but some could probably argue that an even earlier one should be taken, e.g. when the various mesopotamian empires conquered it. On the other hand the Roman takeover seems to be when Egypt truly became a vassal and lost its independence.

reactspa• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription

This is as important a discovery because it helped decipher cuneiform, a language that existed in parallel to hieroglyphics.

The Demotic language mentioned as a shorthand form of hieroglyphics... it's the script used to write what we now call "Arabic". That's right, written Arabic is a direct descendent of hieroglyphics.

wl• 5 years ago

Demotic looks like the Arabic script, sure. However, it doesn't work like Arabic. It's a cursive form of the more well-known hieroglyphic script using a later form of the Egyptian language. That means bi-/tri-literals, determinatives, and all that stuff.

The modern Arabic script is only related to Demotic in the sense that it's probably derived from the Phoenician script, which in turn is probably derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

idontwantthis• 5 years ago

Aren't most European scripts derived from Phoenecian? Latin and Cyrillic at least.

KoftaBob• 5 years ago

To add to this: while we lost the ability to decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs until the Rosetta stone, the Egyptian language itself (the words and their meanings) continued to be known/understood/spoken to this day, in the form of the Coptic language.

The Coptic language is essentially Greek letters (plus 7 additional ones for sounds not covered by the Greek alphabet) used to write the Egyptian language.

Coptic was supplanted by Egyptian Arabic as the primary spoken language of Egypt following the Muslim conquest of Egypt, although it remains in use today as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Another fun fact: the Greek letters used to write the Coptic language were based on the Phoenician alphabet, which were based on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. So in essence, the alphabet brought over by the foreign Greeks and then used to write the Egyptian language, was itself based on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, bringing it full circle!

quiffledwerg• 5 years ago

One of the greatest stories of humanity, to find such a wonder.

mherdeg2• 5 years ago

Two of my favorite artifacts in the British Museum are the Young letter and the Champollion publication, where Young in 1818 explains his theory that hieroglyphic pictograms sometimes represent sounds, and Champollion in 1822 gives a detailed phonetic breakdown of each hieroglyph (photos in https://blog.britishmuseum.org/everything-you-ever-wanted-to... and also in https://cosmolearning.org/images/a-letter-from-thomas-young-...).

They're on display in a case, easy to miss, near the replica Rosetta stone that you can touch ( https://g.co/arts/Jc9fSG2q4FfZzCPT9 )

I love these artifacts because they show a real live example of the way people did science a few centuries ago.

The pace is thought-provoking -- it took 4+ years between one person's letter and another's results? we didn't even declare the translation "done" until 1824? -- and I've always wondered what was going on there.

This is an interesting book review, helps fill in some gaps for me!

I am a little surprised to see the author use the phrase "Elgin Marbles". This was used ubiquitously a few years back but at some point in the past 5-10 years the preferred phrase seems to have become "The Parthenon Sculptures" (see e.g. https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/...). I'm not quite sure when this happened and when I looked it up recently I couldn't find good news coverage explaining the conscious choice to change the name.

TedDoesntTalk• 5 years ago

Elgin Marbles is such a famous, well-known, and old name that any modern renaming of it must succeed with culture before it sticks.

boomboomsubban4• 5 years ago

It'd probably stick pretty easily if they put the things back in the Parthenon, they're only know as the Elgin Marbles as the Earl of Elgin looted them.

ranko• 5 years ago

The sculptures were created approx 440 BCE, and Elgin wasn't involved with them till around 1800 CE, so it's not obvious that "Elgin Marbles" is an old name in this context. It's also not obvious that Elgin removed them legitimately (the alleged source of his authority is either lost or never existed in the first place).

grey-area• 5 years ago

European museums are full of looted treasures taken from other countries. Perhaps it seemed a little inappropriate to continue to name them after the looter rather than the place they came from?

secondaryacct• 5 years ago

See it another way: the people who "owned" the things did nothing with them for centuries, when Champolion decoded the language millenia later, while the Egyptians were busy praying their new gods destroying their own ancient culture.

You dont need to have been shat from an egyptian vagina to deeply understand, respect and eventually contribute to its culture a thousand times better.

yitchelle• 5 years ago

Came across this podcast some weeks back where they tell the story of how various artefacts ended in British museums. Hopefully, they can expand this out to other museums round the world.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...

anitil• 5 years ago

I was about to make the same recommendation. Marc Fenell is great, he's been a beloved figure in Australian radio for some time. He has a very compassionate view on the world.

bmmayer1• 5 years ago

It really makes you think about how many of the things we know today are based on very loose wisps of foundational information, and this makes knowledge both more precious (because it's so hard to come by), and also should give us great pause to consider any knowledge so sacrosanct, given how it could take a very small piece of new uncovered information to completely change how we think about the world.

George Washington didn't know about dinosaurs. What don't we know about yet, and what do we think is true that will turn out not to be?

dqv2• 5 years ago

This is exactly the problem I see with religion and how literally (some) people interpret religious texts. The texts have gone from spoken word to written and then gone through several translations. Languages have intricacies that change meanings when translated. It’s context-specific and region-specific and time-specific. Words don’t always have the same connotations. Some phrases don’t exist. The translator can put their own biases into the translation despite trying to maintain neutrality. I wouldn’t dare bring this up to a religious person, but I can’t relate to the confidence of accepting their particular linguistic and stylistic variety as being the correct one.

On a more technological note, a COBOL to Java translator has probably made unforeseen mistakes that will change reality for people.

lukeholder• 5 years ago

Not all religious people see sacred texts as infallible or perfect.

The same "context-specific and region-specific and time-specific" criticism could be said for science, statistics, and academics.

Both scripture and science are done by humans, but that doesn't mean there isn't truth in both of them.

akhosravian• 5 years ago

My maternal grandparents are evangelical Christians. I once made the mistake of suggesting to them the King James Bible wasn’t the best text to pick if one was inclined to subscribe to biblical literalism.

That’s when I learned that (at least for them and many folks like them) isn’t a scholarly take but just another faith element immune to scrutiny.

TchoBeer• 5 years ago

Would bible literalism be sensible if you understood Hebrew? Translation is a big problem with Christians specifically, but imo it's not "exactly the problem with religion".

simula67• 5 years ago

This is why the study of ancient languages used in religious texts are important. Many churches still conduct some activities in dead languages. For example, the Roman Catholic Church still publishes texts in Latin and trains people in Latin. Other churches study Koine Greek even today. Scholars of theology sometimes study Biblical Hebrew and even Aramaic. The good scholars often use their grasp of history, politics, philosophy etc. while performing their exegesis.

VictorPath• 5 years ago

Biblical professor Bart Ehrman has written many books about how the bible was put together. The Comma Johanneum, the most explicit reference to the doctrine of the trinity is not found in the original Greek (or in early non-Latin translations) until Erasmus was pressured (against his desire) to include it in his Greek Bible in 1522.

Also, the first gospel written is thought to be Mark. In the King James Bible, Catholic translations etc. Jesus is seen resurrected by the apostles and others. This does not happen in the earliest versions of Mark.

There are lots of things like this, Ehrman goes into many of them.

boomboomsubban4• 5 years ago

Does anyone have an educated guess as to whether we'd now understand hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone? I know other phonetic languages with likely fewer available documents have been decoded without such a tool, but at least from a laypersons perspective the pictographs would male it much more complicated. I guess Demotic would allow one to workaround that hurdle.

lostlogin• 5 years ago

I can’t answer you question, but there is at least one more poorly understood ’written’ language, the Quipu, made by the Inca.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

flobosg• 5 years ago

Here’s a list with more of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undeciphered_writing_systems

urubu• 5 years ago

There are other bi-/trilingual texts, like the decree of Canopus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_of_Canopus

Bayart• 5 years ago

You can just look at Linear A[1] if you want a well known example of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

chrisaiv• 5 years ago

This article is so good we should archive it => http://archive.today/9kEh1

sedatk• 5 years ago

But, who's going to archive archive.today?

open-source-ux• 5 years ago

The BBC radio programme In Our Time featured the Rosetta Stone earlier this year (Feb 2021). Three academic experts discuss the history of the stone and the efforts to decode the inscription. It's a very informative discussion.

You can download the programme here:

In Our Time: The Rosetta Stone: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s2qd

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of Champollion in deciphering the hieroglyphs on The Rosetta Stone, when the written culture of ancient Egypt opened to the modern world.

choeger• 5 years ago

What's more interesting, IMO, how did Young come to his conclusions and how did others build on it (and on the Rosetta stone). Even if you know a little hieroglyphs, how do you extend the vocabulary?

dddddaviddddd• 5 years ago

Essentially, Egyptian language survived as Coptic, which uses a Greek alphabet. The names on the Rosetta Stone are easy to find because they are circled in the hieroglyphs ("cartouches"), and it became clear that the symbols were phonetic. Once you know some phonetic symbols, you can quickly start sounding out other words. Knowing Coptic, you can start to understand what you can read phonetically.

5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN• 5 years ago

On a similar note, no one has deciphered the Indus Valley script or Harappan Script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

How the Rosetta Stone yielded its secrets

Related Stories