THE STONE MATH 404/ SS 316: History of Mathematics
Ayesha N. Ali
M. Omer Sheikh: 2003-02-0129 Sunday 6 th April, 2003
Napoleon, Champollion and the Rosetta Stone
This essay briefly details the discovery and the eventual deciphering of the Rosetta Stone and its benefit to our understanding of cultures.
THE STONE
The Rosetta Stone was carved in 196 B.C. and discovered in 1799 by Napoleon's army in Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt and is named after the very place. This stone provided the key to the oldest and most difficult Egyptian writing system called the hieroglyphics.
The Rosetta stone is a slab of Basalt with engravings made on its polished surface. The dimensions of the stone are 114.4 cm (max.) x 72.3 cm x 27.9 cm (height x width x thickness) and is on display at the British Museum since 1802.
It is somewhat damaged, missing a large part of the upper left-hand corner, and a smaller part of its lower right corner. The chiseled inscriptions are in two languages, Greek and Egyptian, but three scripts. The first of the Egyptian scripts is Hieroglyphs, used 3,000 years ago at the time of the First Dynasty. The second is Demotic, a cursive language that evolved from Hieroglyphs and dating from 643 B.C.
HISTORY OF EXCAVATION
The almost constant warfare between Britain and France resulted in major change in the understanding of hieroglyphics. The French under Napoleon Bonaparte decided that they could defeat the British by attacking Egypt and subsequently controlling the rich food supply from along the Nile and hence in August of 1798, 13 French ships landed near Alexandria at Aboukir Bay in Egypt and marched inland to fight the British near Cairo. The French ground forces won the conflict but the British navy defeated the French navy. Napoleon had believed that he would be in Egypt for only a few months yet in the end he and his men were stranded there for three years with no way to return home.
Since they were going to be staying in Egypt for a while, the French fortified strategic positions using stones recycled from earlier structures. In 1799, while extending Fort Julien near Rosetta, a small city near Alexandria, a young French officer named Pierre-Francois Bouchard found a block of black basalt stone. He immediately realized its worth and had the stone dispatched to some scholars. Recognizing the importance of the stone, the French moved it to Cairo, where copies were made and sent to European scholars for further study.
There is some controversy as to how exactly the stone was found. Some say it was found just lying on the ground while others claim that it was part of an old wall which was ordered demolished by French soldiers.
Eventually, in 1801 the French surrendered to the British and under the terms of the Treaty of Capitulation, all antiquities in the possession of the French, including the Rosetta Stone, were ceded to the British.
TYPES OF HIEROGLYPHIC SCRIPT
The ancient Egyptian language is one of the oldest languages of the world. Egyptian was spoken from about 4,000 BC until the 11th century AD. The Egyptian language has almost 5000 more years of recorded history than any other human language.
The ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs for some 3500 years, beginning roughly in 3300 BC, but once they abandoned this form of writing the ability to read it too was lost for centuries. Early attempts to decipher these symbols met with limited success. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone offered scholars a way to unlock the secrets of the hieroglyphs.
The Greeks first named Egyptian script ta hieroglyphica or "sacred carved (letters)". Hieroglyphic script is mostly pictorial--familiar images of natural and man-made objects. It is more than simple picture writing, richer than our own English alphabet, and far more difficult to learn. Less than 1000 hieroglyphs were in general use at any one time; in the Late Period (712-332 BC), however, the number climbed to 6000.
The Ancient Egyptians used three distinct scripts to record their language.
The Rosetta Stone contained two of these scripts the Hieroglyphs and the Demotic besides the third inscription in Greek.
THE ROLE OF SCHOLARS
For 1400 years, no one knew how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs.
A French linguist, Silvestre deSacy, established the relationship between the Demotic symbols and sounds by identifying the characters forming the words “Ptolemy” and “Alexander.” Later a Swedish diplomat, Johann Akerblad, who was familiar with the Coptic language (used as early as the Fourth Century AD by Egyptian Christians, written with the Greek alphabet with seven additional characters from the Demotic script), identified the words for “love,” “temple,” and “Greek.” This established the phonetic nature of Demotic, plus the important fact that it could be translated!
The first modern translation of the Greek text on the stone was made by Stephen Weston in 1802. At this time archaeologist/linguist Silvestre deSacy and the British physician and physicist Thomas Young were trying to decipher the hieroglyphs. Young established that foreign names had to be represented phonetically. Such names were conventionally encircled by frames, or cartouches. Cartouche is the French word for cartridges or kartoos in present day Urdu. Young deciphered five cartouches.
Prior to Young's breakthrough, attempts to read Egyptian hieroglyphs had been farcical. Copies of Egyptian texts were circulating in Europe as early as the 17th century and were being studied by the great minds of the day. The best efforts of the renowned German professor of mathematics, Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) highlighted the problems of these early translation attempts. The seven hieroglyphs which we now know spell out the Greek title 'Autocrator' (born by the Roman Emperor Domitian) were read by Kircher as 'The author of fruitfulness and of all vegetation is Osiris, whose productive force was produced in his kingdom out of heaven through the holy Mophta.'
Clearly, there was no understanding that many of the individual signs of the Egyptian script were simply letters of an alphabet rather than 'ideas' or 'things'. This was the fundamental error of interpretation which Young was to rectify when he published his initial findings in the Supplement to the fourth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1819.
The historian and linguist Jean François Champollion, the founder of scientific Egyptology, is credited with actually deciphering what was inscribed on the stone and is known as the “Father of the Decipherment of Hieroglyphs.”
Champollion was born in Figeac, France. By the age of 16 he had mastered six ancient Middle Eastern languages as well as Latin and Greek. When only 19 he was named professor of history at the Lyceum of Grenoble.
In 1807 Champollion studied with deSacy and read the works of Thomas Young, but disagreed with Young’s view that the writing was alphabetic. Champollion believed that both Demotic and hieroglyphics represented symbols, not sounds. Soon, however, he came to understand that not only were proper names rendered phonetically, but each hieroglyph could represent a sound.
Deciphering of hieroglyphics then became his constant preoccupation. He succeeded at this difficult task because the stone was inscribed with known Greek equivalents of the ancient Egyptian writing. After 14 years of study, he finally deciphered the hieroglyphs. The results of his great achievement were announced in 1822 in a now famous letter he wrote to the French Royal Academy of Inscriptions.
Champollion based his approach to deciphering hieroglyphs on three fundamental and brilliant assumptions:
THE INSCRIPTIONS
The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree called the The Memphite Decreande passed by a council of priests, one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. The other stones in the series haven’t been found as yet even if they exist.
Before the Ptolemaic era (earlier than 332 BC), decrees in hieroglyphs such as on this stone were usually set up by the king. It shows how much things had changed from Pharaonic times so that now the priests, the only people who had kept the knowledge of writing hieroglyphs, were issuing such decrees.
In 1826 Champollion became director of the Egyptian collection at the Louvre museum in Paris, and two years later he conducted an archaeological expedition to Egypt. In 1831 he was given the professorship of Egyptian antiquities, which had been created especially for him, at the College of France. His published works included an Egyptian grammar and dictionary, the 'Primer of the Hieroglyphic System', and a book entitled 'Egyptian Pantheon'.
THE CONTROVERSY
It is clear today that Champollion did indeed make a major contribution to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian in taking Young's work a great deal further. However, his failure to give due credit to the man who had made the initial breakthrough has hung like a blotch on Champollion’s credibility ever since.
Back in July 1815, one of the main players in the decipherment, he French archaeologist Silvestre deSacy, wrote what turned out to be a prophetic letter of warning to Young: 'If I have a counsel to give it is that you should not too much communicate your discoveries to M. Champollion. He would be able then to pretend afterwards to priority. He seeks in several places in his work to create the belief that he has discovered many words of the Egyptian inscription of Rosetta. I fear that this is nothing but charlatanism'.
And this is precisely what happened in the later period. However, historians today do keep the record straight and mention due credit for both the literary figures for their contribution to learning.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STONE
Why should a lump of rock with a few lines of text be so important? This is because the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to unlocking the history and culture of the ancient Egyptian civilisation. Within twenty five years of its discovery the mysterious script of the Pharaohs was deciphered and the inscriptions covering Egypt's temples and tombs were being read like a huge encyclopedia spanning 3,000 years of history. The last hieroglyphic text had been inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Isis at Philae (south of Aswan) a few centuries after the birth of Christ and then the ancient Egyptian language had fallen silent for nearly 1,500 years. Now, thanks to the Rosetta Stone, the world's greatest ancient civilisation is giving up its secrets to the modern world and spanned a new and renewed interest in the workings of ancient civilizations all over the world. The Mayans are also known to have a hieroglyphic script and the understanding of the Rosetta Stone has given new insights into how the Mayan script can be deciphered
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
There are currently two scientific projects inspired by the story of the Rosetta Stone.
On the one hand is the European Space Agency (ESA). Just as the Rosetta Stone provided the key to an ancient civilization, so the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will allow scientists to unlock the mysteries of the oldest building blocks of our Solar System, the comets. Billions of these giant chunks of ice still linger in the depths of space, the remnants of a vast swarm of objects which once surrounded our Sun and eventually came together to form planets. Did life on Earth begin with the help of 'seeding' from comets? These are unanswered questions and the Rosetta spacecraft will definitely provide us with new insights and help us in the advancement of our knowledge and understanding of the universe.
On the other hand is The Long Now Foundation. According to the Foundation 50 to 90 percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation. Much of the work that has been done, especially on smaller languages, remains hidden away in personal research files or poorly preserved in under-funded archives.
As part of the effort to secure this critical legacy of linguistic diversity, The Long Now Foundation is creating a broad online survey and near permanent physical archive of 1,000 of the approximately 7,000 languages on the planet. This effort is called the Rosetta Project.
The resulting Rosetta archive will be publicly available in three different media:
The disk can be read at different optical and electronic resolutions and is available for purchase by those interested.
According to the Foundation, “this effort will help draw attention to the tragedy of language extinction as well as provide impetus for the work to preserve what we have left of the critical manifestation of the human intellect; the language.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.tihof.org/honors/champollion.htm
http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/prehistory/egypt/hieroglyphics/rosettastone.html
http://www.chesco.com/~cslice/aurora/rosetta/rosetta.html
http://www.napoleonseries.org/articles/misc_art/rosetta.cfm
http://ragz-international.com/champollion.htm
http://www.clemusart.com/archive/pharaoh/glyphs.html
http://www.sis.gov.eg/egyptinf/history/html/1108b.htm
http://www.egyptology.com/kmt/winter95_96/giants.html
http://www.nunki.net/PerDud/TheWorks/Express/HeiroCode.html
http://www.napoleonguide.com/rosetta.htm
http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/conservation/cleaning2.html
http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/ixbin/goto?id=OBJ67
http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/egyptian/ea/ccodes/index.html