The Rosette Stone

The Rosetta Stone

On the walls and columns of Karnak, at Dendera, everywhere in Egypt, Champollion delighted to find that he could read the inscriptions almost effortlessly. Many before him have tried and failed to decipher the lonely hieroglyphics, a word that means “sacred carvings”. Some scholars have believed them to be a kind of murky metaphor, mostly about eyeballs and wavy lines, beetles, bumblebees and birds – especially birds.

Confusion was rampant. There were those who deduced that the Egyptians were colonists from ancient China. There were those who concluded the opposite. Enormous folio volumes of spurious translations were published. One interpreter glanced at the Rosetta stone, whose hieroglyphic inscriptions was then still undeciphered, and instantly announced its meaning. He said the quick decipherment enabled him “to avoid the systematic errors which invariably arise from prolonged reflection.” You had better results, he argued, but not thinking too much. And with the search for extraterrestrial life today the unbridled speculation of amateurs had frightened many professionals out of the field.

Champollion resisted the idea of hieroglyphics as pictorial metaphors. Instead, with the aid of a brilliant insight by the English physicist Thomas Young, he proceeded something like this : The Rosetta stone had been uncovered in 1799 by a French solider working on the fortifications of the Nile Delta town of Rashid, which the Europeans, largely ignorant of Arabic, called Rosetta. It was a slab from an ancient temple, displaying what seemed clearly to be the same message in three different writings: in hieroglyphics at top, in a kind of cursive hieroglyphics called demotic in the middle, and the key to the enterprise, in Greek at the bottom.

The Rosetta Stone. Silence alone is great; all else is weakness (Alfred DeVigny, La mort du loup, 1864). Image: © Elena

Champollion, who was fluent in ancient Greek, read that the stone had been inscribed to commemorate the coronation of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, in the spring of the year 196 B.C. On this occasion the king released political prisoners, remitted taxes, endowed temples, forgave rebels, increased military preparedness and, in short, did all the things that modern rulers do when they wish to stay in office.

The Greek texts mentions Ptolemy many times. In roughly the same positions in the hieroglyphics text is a set of symbols surrounded by an oval or cartouche. This, Champollion reasoned, very probably also denotes Ptolemy. If so, the writing could not be fundamentally pictographic or metaphorical; rather, most of the symbols must stand for letters or syllables.

Champollion also had the presence of mind to count up the number of Greek words and the number of individual hieroglyphs in what were presumably equivalent texts. There were many fewer of the former, again suggesting that the hieroglyphs were mainly letters and syllables. But which hieroglyphs correspond to which letters? Fortunately, Champollion had available to him an obelisk, which had been excavated at Philae, that included the hieroglyphics equivalent of the Greek name Cleopatra.

The two cartouches for Ptolemy and for Cleopatra, were rearranged so the both read left to right. Ptolemy begins with P; the first symbol on the cartouche is a square. Cleopatra has for its fifth letter a P, and in the Cleopatra cartouche in the fifth position is the same square. P it is. The fourth letter in Ptolemy is an L. Is it represented by the lion? The second letter of Cleopatra is an L and, in hieroglyphics, here is a lion again. The eagle is a A, appearing twice in Cleopatra, as it should. A clear pattern is emerging. Egyptian hieroglyphics are, in significant part, a simple substitution cipher. But not every hieroglyph is a letter or syllable. Some are pictographs.

The end of the Ptolemy cartouche means “Ever-living, beloved of the god Ptah.” The semicircle and egg at the end of Cleopatra are a conventional ideogram for “daughter of Isis”. This mix of letters and pictographs caused some grief for earlier interpreters.

In retrospect it sounds almost easy. But it had taken many centuries to figure out, and there was a great deal more to do, especially in the decipherment of the hieroglyphics of much earlier times. The cartouches were the key within the key, almost as if the pharaohs of Egypt had circled their own names to make the going easier for the Egyptologists two thousand years in the future. Champollion walked the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karmak and casually read the inscriptions, which had mystified everyone else, answering the question he had posed as a child to Fourier. What a joy it must have been to open this one-way communication channel with another civilization, to permit a culture that had been mute for millennia to speak of its history, magic, medicine, religion, politics and philosophy.