Rosetta Stone - "Finding a Lost Language"

For thousands of years, this language has been a mystery to the world. What was the meaning of the strange symbols carved in the pyramids? Why were they so elaborate? Who put them there? We now have most of the answers.

History

Written language began in the northeast corner of Africa 5000 years ago among the peoples along the Nile. They used pictures to represent words. These were known as ideograms. The ideograms evolved into representations of sounds, or phonograms. These writings were called hieroglyphs, meaning "sacred inscriptions," because they were often found on the walls of temples.

The ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs for more than 3500 years (until 400 C.E.). Afterwards, they used the Greek alphabet with some extra letters added to represent Egyptian sounds. This form of writing was called Coptic. Coptic was eventually replaced by Arabic, which is spoken in Egypt today. The ancient Egyptian language died out and was forgotten. The last heiroglyphic text was written 1600 years ago. Since then, no one had any idea what the hieroglyphs represented, so they made up their own translations. They decided they were magic spells and secret religious chants.

The Rosetta Stone

The key to unlocking the secrets of the hieroglyphs would not come until 1799, with the discovery of the Rosetta stone. Some Frenchmen in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte building a fortress in the town of Rashid (then called Rosetta) found a piece of basalt covered in writing.

This stele , which was written on March 27th, 196 B.C.E., was dubbed the Rosetta Stone.

The reason this stone was so important is this: There was a decree written on the stone. The decree wasn't particularly important (It praised the ancient Egyptian King Ptolemy V), but the way it was written was! The Rosetta Stone had the same piece of writing on it written in three different languages. The first was ancient Egyptian, the second Demotic (a later form of ancient Egyptian), and the third section was written in Greek. In that time, there had been many Greeks living in Egypt, and most of them couldn't read hieroglyphs or Demotic. Therefore, the decree was written in three languages so that it could be understood by everyone.

In 1799, no one could read hieroglyphs or Demotic, but they could read ancient Greek. The Greek section was translated, and used to decipher the older two sections. Johan David Akerblad, a Swedish diplomat, made some progress with identifying the phonetic symbols in the Demotic version, but that was as far as anyone got. You see, everyone was still thinking that each hieroglyph represented a word, and of course that wasn't right.

Then, in 1814, an Englishman named Thomas Young realized that the hieroglyphs might represent sounds, and these sounds could be combined to form words. Of course, he didn't understand any of the words, and he couldn't even tell what the sounds were, but he identified the names and places in the Greek writing and compared them to the Egyptian writing, deducing correctly that the words in cartouches were the names of Kings and Queens.

For twenty more year’s different people tried to decipher the language. Finally, Jean-François Champollioin succeeded. He was fluent in Coptic, Arabic, and Hebrew, three descendants of ancient Egyptian. Gradually, he discovered the sounds the pictures represented. He realized all 24 characters formed an alphabet. He realized there were also a few hieroglyphs that did stand for words. His predecessors had been partly right, after all. Finally, in 1822 at the age of 21, Champollion became the first person in 1500 years to read the language of the ancient Egyptians.

The Rosetta stone now rests in the British Museum in London.

This is a chapter from "Ancient Peoples: A Hypertext View," draft by Richard A. Strachan and Kathleen A. Roetzel (1997)