Ancient Egypt exerts a strong pull on the imagination of all generations, refusing to remain buried in the past.
But much of what we now take for granted about this world of mummies, pyramids and tombs remained shrouded in silence for centuries until French soldiers stumbled upon a broken slab of inscribed stone in 1799.
The artifact depicted three different ancient scripts. Found while Napoleon’s army was digging the foundations of a fort at Rosetta, now called El-Rashid, Egypt, the stone provided the key to decoding hieroglyphics – the ancient Egyptian writing system – and unlocked the secrets of one of the most ancient civilizations. oldest in the world.
At that time, no one could read the beautiful images and symbols carved in stone and painted on papyrus scrolls discovered in temples along the Nile – although medieval Arab scholars and Renaissance-era travelers found them a source of fascination.
The importance of the engraved piece of stone was immediately recognized, including by soldiers, said Egyptologist Ilona Regulski. She is the curator of a new exhibition at the British Museum in London that explores the race to decode the Rosetta Stone and celebrates the 200th anniversary of the discovery.
Under the terms of Napoleon’s defeat in the region, British forces shipped the slab, made of a dark granite-like stone known as granodiorite, to Britain and arrived at the British Museum in 1802. Casts were made and sent to Egyptologists in across Europe – an early attempt at crowdsourcing.
“Within two years after the stone was discovered, every European country had a copy. And that was a conscious process by the scholars to distribute the text, because everyone wanted to speed up the process,” Regulski said.
“I think for a lot of scholars at the time, it didn’t matter who would be first, as long as it was done, because there was hope that it would give so much information about ancient Egypt that it turned out to be correct.”
However, the quest to unravel the ancient writing took two decades of linguistic detours through dead ends – an eternity in the age of Google Translate.
“If you look at the notes, this came as a surprise to me when I started working on this exhibition. […] it is not one step after another. There are a lot of wrong turns,” she said.
The broken stone features three writings in two languages – 14 lines of formal hieroglyphics, 32 lines in the demotic language (the simplified, everyday calligraphy used in ancient Egypt), and 54 lines of ancient Greek – the only one of the three understood at the time. The inscription itself is a mass decree passed in 196 BC by a council of priests to mark the first anniversary of the coronation of 13-year-old Ptolemy V Epiphanes.
A young Frenchman named Jean-François Champollion made the breakthrough. He first studied the script obsessively at age 17, choosing to focus on the circled hieroglyphics believed to be the names of important Egyptian figures.
“He got his first good look in 1808, but he was very discouraged, actually, because he found it very difficult. And he complained that the copies were not good. And then he looked at some other objects and also became very dismayed. And then he said, okay, I’m dropping everything,” Regulski said.
Frustrated, he stopped his efforts, opting to delve into Coptic – a living language derived from ancient Egyptian.
In England, Champollion’s main rival in the race to decode the stone focused his efforts on the demotic section of the stone. The Doctor. Thomas Young demonstrated that this section was composed of sounds as well as ideographic signs (words or ideas). However, he was not convinced that hieroglyphics had a phonetic component.
Champollion announced his breakthrough in September 1822, according to Regulski, proving that it was a phonetic language, not just a script.
“The very important thing that Champollion discovers and distinguishes him from anyone else before him is that he realizes that it’s not just alphabetic, but it’s a hybrid or mixed system. There are signs that are complete words and then there are signs that are individual letters and everything works together. He can understand that,” Regulski explained.
The Rosetta Stone has been on display in the British Museum since 1802 and only had a two-year break during World War I when it was kept underground for safety. With the anniversary of its decipherment, Egyptian scholars renewed calls for the object to be returned. However, Regulski said the museum has not received any formal requests from Egypt.
The exhibition also celebrates the bravado of culture revealed by hieroglyphics – why and how the dead were mummified, the sophisticated systems of time measurement, as well as how ordinary people loved, married, divorced, did their math and did their business.
*Editor’s Note: “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt” is on display at the British Museum, London from 13 October 2022 to 19 February 2023.
Source: CNN Brasil
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