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So there used to be a kiosk selling
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a language learning service in Newark Airport.
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Every couple of minutes, an
automated message would shout out
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“ROSETTA STONE: THE FASTEST WAY
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TO LEARN A LANGUAGE, GUARANTEED.”
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Now, I can’t speak to how effective
those disks are at teaching you
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a language. And we all know the
thing they got their name from –
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a 2,000-year-old stone from ancient Egypt that
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helped us translate the lost
writing system of hieroglyphics.
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But apart from that, most people don’t
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actually know that much about this artifact.
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So today, we’re going to talk
about the original Rosetta Stone,
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what it helped us learn, and the modern
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controversy around this ancient artifact.
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[♪INTRO]
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Ok, so first, a little background.
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You’re probably familiar with hieroglyphs.
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These are the symbols you’ve
seen written on ancient
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Egyptian artifacts or in
documentaries, like The Mummy.
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You know, the documentary.
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Hieroglyphs are the original writing
system of the ancient Egyptians.
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The name comes from a Greek
word meaning ‘sacred carvings.’
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The first hieroglyphs appeared around 3,000 BCE,
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or roughly 5,000 years ago, and they stayed
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in use for roughly 3,500 years.
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In Egypt’s long history,
versions of this script were used
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for everything from decorating
temples to writing grocery lists.
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But, by the 4th century CE,
hieroglyphs were mostly used in a
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religious setting, which unfortunately
set them up for their downfall.
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Egypt was conquered and made a part of
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the Roman Empire in 30 BCE.
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And while the Roman Empire was historically
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fairly tolerant of other
faiths, in 3rd century BCE,
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Christianity became the
official religion of the Empire.
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This new Christian empire
ordered the destruction of
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pagan temples and banned the use of hieroglyphs.
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The last known hieroglyphs were made in 394 CE.
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Soon thereafter, people lost the
ability to read them entirely.
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Luckily for us, the desert
preserves things remarkably well.
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So for centuries, people could
see that ancient Egyptians had
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left behind this treasure trove
of writing on ruins and papryuses.
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Papyri?
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Anyway, even though they
found it all over the place,
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no one knew what any of it said.
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Scholars over the centuries tried
to decipher the mysterious script.
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In the 9th century, an alchemist
living in what is now Iraq
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may have successfully
deciphered a few hieroglyphics.
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Later, a 17th century Jesuit priest
claimed to have cracked the code,
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though his work was later discredited.
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The big problem all these translators ran into was
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that they had nothing to compare hieroglyphs to.
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No one even spoke the language
of the ancient Egyptians anymore,
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and nobody had any two
documents in different scripts
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that they even thought might say the same thing.
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What the world needed was a key to break the code.
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That chance came in 1799 with the
discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
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In 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt,
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which was then ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
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The story goes that a French
officer named Bouchard was
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dismantling a fort near
modern-day Rashid in 1799 when
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one of his men came across a
stone carved with hieroglyphs.
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Bouchard knew they’d found something special.
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See, the bottom third of the Rosetta
Stone is written entirely in Greek.
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And scholars at the time loved reading in Greek.
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Bouchard and other researchers
of the day figured that
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the other two languages carved
into the stone might be copies of
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the same message that was written in the Greek.
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If scholars could figure
out how to pair hieroglyphs
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with the Greek words, they might be able to crack
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the code on this ancient writing system.
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News of the stone echoed throughout Europe.
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This was the best chance in
centuries for scholars to learn
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what ancient Egypt had to say in its own words.
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By reading Greek, scholars knew
that the stone was a decree
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issued by ancient Egyptian priests to celebrate
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the accomplishments of a
young king called Ptolemy V.
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All they had to do was pair this message
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with the hieroglyphs, and voila!
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Some people claimed it would take
just two weeks to crack the code.
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It did not take two weeks to crack the code.
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All in all, it took twenty years
before any real progress was made.
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A lot of researchers had their fingers in the pie.
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Many studied texts from Arabic and medieval
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scholars who tried their hand
at decoding hieroglyphics.
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In the end, two major discoveries are
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responsible for the Rosetta Stone’s decoding.
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The first came in 1814 when a British polymath
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called Thomas Young made a crucial realization.
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Most scholars at the time assumed
that hieroglyphs weren’t phonetic.
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Instead, they thought each image represented
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a discrete word or idea,
sort of like Japanese kanji.
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The Rosetta stone has these pockets of outlined
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hieroglyphs on the stone,
which we now call cartouches.
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Young realized that these pill-shaped
sections of the text corresponded
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with areas where the Greek
text referred to king Ptolemy.
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This led him to argue that the symbols in the
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cartouches corresponded to
the sounds in Ptolemy’s name.
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That was strike one for the
symbol-only theory of hieroglyphs.
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Then a French scholar called
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Jean-Francois Champollion took it even farther.
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Champollion realized that there
were simply too many hieroglyphs
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on the stone for each one
to represent their own idea.
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So instead, he approached it as a phonetic
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language rather than a pictographic one.
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Champollion translated Greek words into Coptic,
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a dead language that was once used by
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Egyptians before they picked up Arabic.
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From there, he was able to
sound out the hieroglyphs –
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pairing each image with its own sound.
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In a classic Archimedes
move, Champollion reportedly
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jumped up and yelled “I’ve got
it!” when he made this discovery.
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He published his work on this in 1822.
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And while this was a major
discovery, it wasn’t 100% accurate.
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We now know that hieroglyphs are
a mix of symbolic and phonetics,
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and this system is so complex that
we still have trouble reading them.
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But this moment marked the
first time in 1,400 years that
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anyone at all could begin to
read this ancient language.
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But before we get into what the stone says,
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here’s a quick ad break.
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Okay, now that we’ve established
how the Rosetta Stone
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was translated, let’s talk about
what the heck it even says.
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Because the very first
question on anyone’s minds was,
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why does this ancient Egyptian
artifact have Greek writing on it?
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This is tied to the history of the stone.
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The Rosetta Stone originally was part of a stela,
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a kind of square column with a rounded top.
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It was made in 196 BCE as part of a decree to
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celebrate the accomplishments of Ptolemy V,
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who at the time the decree was
written, was a whole 13-years-old.
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The reason why Greek is
included in the Rosetta stone
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is that it was the administrative language used
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in ancient Egypt during the Ptolemaic dynasty.
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Alexander the Great invaded Egypt in 332 BCE.
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After he died, one of his generals took
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over Egypt and became pharaoh.
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So Ptolemy V is the descendant
of that Greek-speaking general.
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The priests of Memphis are
basically trying to hype this
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young king in the eyes of the Egyptian public.
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The actual message of the
decree celebrates Ptolemy’s
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military victories and his
decision to lower taxes.
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The decree also states that
copies of this message are
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to be carved in stone in
all temples across Egypt –
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and indeed, we’ve found around 28 other
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stone copies of this message so far.
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To reach the most people, the decree is
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composed in Egypt’s three languages.
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You’ve got sacred hieroglyphs
to speak to the gods on top,
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and Greek, the administrative
language on the bottom.
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So,what about this middle part?
This is a language called demotic.
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It also has a long history that we
simply do not have time to get into.
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But basically, this would’ve been the everyday
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language of Egyptians during the Ptolemaic period.
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You see, Egypt was around for so long that their
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spoken language outpaced the
writing system, by a lot.
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By the time Alexander The
Great was invading Egypt,
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hieroglyphs didn’t really match up with how
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people actually spoke in their day to day.
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Like, if you ever go and look
at how old English was written,
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hieroglyphs probably looked like that to
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the Egyptians living in the Ptolemaic time.
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Priests still wrote in
hieroglyphs because it was sacred,
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but everyone else needed a writing
system for the everyday stuff –
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writing a contract, or a list, or what have you.
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That was demotic.
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Unfortunately demotic went out of style too,
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because translating it was a whole thing.
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So the priests who wrote this
message on the stone probably spoke
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to each other in a language
that corresponded to demotic,
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wrote in Greek, and had that
message translated into hieroglyphs.
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This decision to spread what
essentially amounts to Ptolemy
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propaganda written 2,000-years-ago
now means that modern
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Egyptologists can read hieroglyphs for themselves.
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And translating these hieroglyphs
was more than just a fun exercise.
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Unlocking the secret to what the
ancient Egyptians were writing about
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way back then helped us learn a lot
of basic info we’d been missing.
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Stuff that’s as basic as how old Egypt really is.
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In 1824, Champillion translated hieroglyphics
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from the 3,000-year-old temple wall of Ramses II.
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Champillion compared this list to
a papyrus called the Turin Canon,
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a document that listed kings and queens,
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including those not typically counted
in the official line of succession.
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Scholars at the time thought that
Egypt was founded somewhere in
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the ballpark of classical
Greece or Rome, so 500 BCE, ish.
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But the temple and the papyrus
combined revealed that Egypt’s
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pharaohs stretched back way, way
further, all the way to 3100 BCE.
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Since then, hieroglyphs
have been a key component in
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helping us decode the ancient
world of the Egyptians.
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Nearly a hundred years after
they’d found the Turin Canon,
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the archeologist Howard Carter used hieroglyphs
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to identify that the newly
discovered site he’d been
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working on was the tomb of King Tutankhamun.
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Hieroglyphs and the hieratic
script, which is just curvy
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hieroglyphs on papyrus,
has taught us about Egypt’s
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dynasties and collapses and
kings and, well, everything.
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The Rosetta Stone isn’t a source of much active
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research these days. But
its gift of decoding ancient
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Egyptian life is still an
important part of Egyptology today.
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People often think that archeologists
have worked out everything
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there is to know about ancient
Egypt. But that’s not true.
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This culture lasted so long and had so many
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dynasties that each new site is an opportunity
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to learn something new about these ancient people.
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Like, we don’t know a lot about
the time that Egypt was ruled by
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people from modern-day Sudan
during Intermediate Period III.
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And whatever we’ll learn about that time will only
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be possible thanks to understanding hieroglyphs.
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But while there’s not a ton of
ongoing research on the Rosetta Stone,
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it’s a pretty hot topic for
a totally different reason.
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At least three invading armies
are intimately tied to the history
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of the stone, and that kind
of violence leaves an impact.
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Today, the Rosetta Stone is one
of the most visited artifacts
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in the British Museum, but
not everyone wants it there.
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The British Museum came to
own the stone after a combined
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Ottoman-Anglo force defeated the
French army in Egypt in 1801.
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Part of the treaty required
France to give Britain all
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the antiquities they’d
found during their invasion.
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And today, the British Museum seems
to be a big fan of the philosophy
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of “finders keepers,” meaning that
they have no plans to give it back.
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Various figures within Egyptian academic circles,
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as well as the people in
Egypt, would very much like
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the Rosetta Stone to be returned to its homeland.
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However, opponents of returning
the stone point out that
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Egypt has its own copies of the
decree found at other sites.
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But obviously, none of these
other copies of the decrees are
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the iconic Rosetta Stone, so advocates for
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repatriation aren’t going to give up anytime soon.
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The Rosetta Stone was the answer to a puzzle that
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had befuddled scholars for hundreds of years.
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It was the perfect, tailor-made
solution to an otherwise
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impossible translational mystery,
so much so that the phrase
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Rosetta Stone is a synonym for
any discovery that suddenly
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broadens our understanding of
a bunch of things all at once.
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So now you know the history
and legacy of this iconic,
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controversial, and remarkable
piece of ancient history,
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and the source of one incredibly annoying
00:13:26
marketing campaign in the Newark Airport.
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[♪OUTRO]
