1802 The Rosetta Stone, so called because it was discovered in the Egyptian port of Rosetta or Rashid, is one of the most popular exhibits at the British Museum, where it has been kept for over two centuries. From a few feet away it’s not much to look at – a lump of dark grey granite measuring 3 feet 9 inches high and 2 feet 4½ inches wide. It’s what’s on it that makes it remarkable. The same message is given three times over: in Greek; in the Egyptian demotic, or vernacular; and in hieroglyphics, or the sacred writing used by the priestly caste.
Before French army engineer Captain Pierre-François Bouchard discovered the stele in the summer of 1799, modern knowledge of hieroglyphics was limited to a few fragments. Now here was a sizeable chunk of a language known to everyone with a liberal education – between 1,600 and 1,700 words in the English translation of the Greek – enough to unlock a wide variety of the puzzling symbols.
What was found – by the English physicist Thomas Young and the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, perhaps the greatest natural linguist of his generation – was that the hieroglyphics worked in two ways: phonetically and as pictograms. The picture writing was clear enough: the outline of an ibis stood for an ibis. But it could be read abstractly too, as when a crescent could stand for the moon and also a month, or the diagram of a reed and tablet, for writing or even a scribe. The phonetic hieroglyphs worked synthetically, each element contributing a sound based on the name of the thing pictured, which, added to the other ‘letters’ in the ‘word’, gave the sound (not the picture) of the thing or concept represented.
How exciting was the message, once deciphered? Alas, not very. It dates from 196 BC, the first anniversary of the coronation of the thirteen-year-old Ptolemy V. It’s bulked out with flattery along the lines of ‘O King, live for ever’, in which is embedded a priestly decree thanking the king for his favours shown, in such a way as almost to imply he’d better keep up the good work:
King Ptolemy, the ever-living, beloved by Ptah, the god Manifest and Gracious, the son of King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoë, the Parent-loving gods, has done many benefactions to the temples and to those who dwell in them, and also to all those subject to his rule, being from the beginning a god born of a god and a goddess.
The benediction in return for a benefaction gets down to particulars, with reference to the revenues both of silver and of grain bestowed on the temples, in return for which ‘the gods have rewarded him with health, victory, power, and all other good things, his sovereignty to continue to him and his children for ever’ – so long as he keeps the moolah coming.