The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A symbol of our obsession with Ancient Egypt
THE ROSETTA STONE
There is nothing like a good codebreaking story to fire the imagination. And that is exactly what lies behind the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum and our century-old obsession with cruising the Nile and exploring the great sights of the Valley of the Kings and the Pyramids.
The stone is the museum’s most-visited object, but it may – initially – be something of a disappointment to many of the tourists who crowd around it today in the Egyptian sculpture gallery. After all, it looks like nothing more than a large fragment of fractured dark grey stone, carved with strange characters and symbols.
Those letters and hieroglyphs were, however, the key to deciphering the history of the Ancient Egyptian world, including details of the lives and reigns of the great Pharaohs – from Khufu who constructed the Great Pyramid, to Ramses II and Nefertiti who built rock temples of Abu Simbel.
Until the stone was found in 1799, that history had remained half obscured, shrouded in myth and mystery. Many, many objects and hieroglyphic texts had been found, but no one knew what they meant because the language and script had fallen out of use by Roman times.
It was Napoleon’s expeditionary forces in Egypt who made the crucial discovery which was to lead to the decoding of this strange script. Some of his soldiers were extending a fort near the city of Rosetta (Rashid) in the Nile Delta when they exposed a stone covered in ancient inscriptions. It was excavated and saved by their commanding officer who added it to the treasures which Napoleon was planning to take back to France. But before they could be removed from the country, they were seized by the British who had defeated the French at Rosetta as part of the siege and capture of Cairo. The stone was carried in triumph on a gun carriage and taken back to London. This history is summarised in white lettering painted onto the sides when it was installed in the British Museum: “Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801” and “Presented by King George III”.
The text is, in itself, a dull and insignificant piece of political sycophancy. It represents a decree made in 196BC by a council of priests expressing their official support for the then King of Egypt (Ptolemy V). But what made it critical to scholars in the early 19th century is that the text of the decree is written in three different scripts – Demotic (the local language of the area at the time), Ancient Greek (as spoken by the then ruling elite) and – critically – also in ancient hieroglyphs. Historians could now compare the Ancient Greek with the hieroglyphs, work out what they meant, and at last decode the many, many texts which had survived from the time of the earlier Pharaohs.
At least that was the theory. The breakthrough didn’t happen overnight, however. In the early 1820s a French scholar, Jean-Francois Champollion, realised that the hieroglyphs were not just pictorial symbols of ideas and things – some were also phonetic and represented the spoken sounds of the language. But it still took until the 1850s before the ancient texts of Pharaonic times could easily be translated and the first full grammar of the critical Middle Egyptian period wasn’t published until 1894.
None of this would have been possible without the Rosetta Stone, however. It stands in the British Museum as a monument to our hunger for understanding history in general, and in particular to our enduring fascination with the great sights and characters of Ancient Egypt.