Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs by National Geographic

Author:National Geographic [Williams, `Doglas Preston and ANN R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the summer of 1799, soldiers began a project to expand Fort de Saint-Julien in the town of El Rashid, also known as Rosetta, in the western delta. While digging up ancient walls to make way for new foundations, they found an intriguing stone with rough edges and a smooth, inscribed face—obviously part of a broken monument that had been reused as a building block.

The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, thought it might be important and turned it over to the scientists who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. Fortunately, they made copies of the inscriptions, because the stone would soon leave their hands. By the end of 1801, Britain had brought France’s incursion into Egypt to an end and had taken possession of such antiquities as the Rosetta stone, as arranged by the Treaty of Alexandria.

Almost as soon as the stone was discovered, linguists had begun to puzzle out the secrets encoded in the three different writing systems displayed on it, which together offer a snapshot of the sweeping changes that transformed Egypt over many centuries. In a small, jagged triangle at the top are 14 precious lines of hieroglyphs, a complex script used from about 3200 B.C. to the late fourth century A.D. to record sacred texts on temples, tombs, coffins, monuments, and statues. The middle has 32 lines in Demotic, a cursive script from Egypt’s late pharaonic era that vastly simplified hieroglyphic writing for the purposes of administrative and commercial recordkeeping. The bottom section holds 53 lines in ancient Greek, the official language of the final Ptolemaic dynasty, with which 19th-century European scholars had some familiarity.

When the Rosetta stone was created in the second century B.C., all three of those languages were inscribed on it to ensure that everyone got the message. But with time, the ancient languages became unreadable. In the fourth century A.D., after the arrival of Christianity in Egypt, people stopped learning hieroglyphs because of the script’s link to a pagan religion. Egyptians then began to speak Coptic, written mostly with Greek letters but with a few Demotic signs thrown in to symbolize unique sounds. After the Arab invasion of the seventh century brought a new language and writing system, knowledge of the pharaohs’ texts died out completely.

The discovery of the Rosetta stone gave modern scholars the key to resurrect it. A translation of the Greek, completed quickly, revealed names such as Ptolemy and Alexander, which would prove crucial to deciphering the rest of the stone. French scholar Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad began to work independently on the Demotic. Searching at first for the previously identified proper names, they then worked out a list of possible Demotic characters. They believed that Demotic used a phonetic alphabet, like Greek, whereas hieroglyphic writing used pictographic symbols. They were on the right track but not entirely correct.

In England, a physician, physicist, and mathematician named Thomas Young made breakthroughs when he realized that Demotic was a derivative hybrid, with “imitations of the hieroglyphs … mixed with letters of the alphabet.

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