In 1799, an engineering team in the French army of Napoleon Bonaparte
was building a defensive rampart in Egypt near Rosetta (Rashid in Arabic),
in the Nile Delta. In 1798, Napoleon had led a conquest of Egypt which
was being challenged by the British; thus the need for the team, led
by Lieutenant Pierre Bouchard, to build the rampart.
During the construction, the men happened to unearth a large piece
of black basalt, 3 ft. 9 in (114 cm) long, 2 ft. 4.5 in (72 cm) wide,
and 11 inches (27.5 cm) thick, covered with inscriptions in 3 different
languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics at the top; demotic script (modified
hieroglyphics) in the center; and Greek at the bottom. The stone was
shipped to Cairo, where a French General translated the Greek: a decree
issued by the Egyptian priesthood in 196 BC, praising Egyptian ruler
Ptolemy V Epiphanes for benefits he had conferred on them. (One source
says these benefits included forgiveness of overdue taxes!) The hieroglyphics
and demotic were thought (correctly) to duplicate the decree written
in Greek-but all understanding of how to read these ancient languages
had been lost to the ages.
In 1801, the British took over Egypt and demanded all the antiquities
which the French had found there; fortunately, the French had already
made plaster copies of many of the artifacts, including the Rosetta
Stone. The original stone went to the British Museum, and the cast was
sent back to France. Linguists in both countries applied their minds
to the task of understanding how to read hieroglypics. Thomas Young,
a British physicist and medical practitioner, largely deciphered the
demotic, and scattered bits of the the hieroglyphics; finally, in 1822,
the brilliant French linguist Jean-François Champollion, after
years of poring over the hieroglyphics, came to understand that some
figures were phonetic, some were ideographs; some lines read right to
left, some left to right; and that hieroglyphics had developed over
time, so that the rules governing one inscription would not necessarily
help in understanding another one. Champollion's discoveries, based
on the study of the Rosetta Stone, still form the basis of our understanding
of hieroglyphics.
Sources:
Gods, Graves, & Scholars, by C.W. Ceram. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc,
1967.
The Pleasures of Archaeology, by Karl E. Meyer. Atheneum, 1970.
New Standard Encyclopedia, Standard Educational Corporation, Chicago
1974.
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