The Rosetta Stone: The Discoveries of Dr. Thomas Young: The Classification of the Egyptian Alphabet by Champollion: Egyptian Love-songs and the Book of the Dead
Conspicuously placed in the great hall of Egyptian antiquities, in the British Museum, is a wonderful piece of sculpture known as the Rosetta Stone. A glance at its graven surface suffices to show that three sets of inscriptions are recorded there. The upper one, occupying about one-fourth of the surface, is a pictured scroll, made up of chains of those strange outlines of serpents, hawks, lions, and so on, which are recognised, even by the least initiated, as hieroglyphics. The middle inscription, made up of lines, angles, and half-pictures, one might suppose to be a sort of abbreviated or shorthand hieroglyphic. The third, or lower, inscription, is manifestly Greek, obviously a thing of words. If the screeds above be also made of words, only the elect have any way of proving the fact.
Fortunately, however, even the least scholarly observer is left in no doubt as to the real import of the thing he sees, for an obliging English label tells us that these three inscriptions are renderings of the same message, and that this message is a “decree of the Priests of Memphis conferring divine honours on Ptolemy V., Epiphanes, King of Egypt, B.C. 195.” The label goes on to state that the upper transcription (of which, unfortunately, only parts of the last dozen lines or so remain, the slab being broken) is in “the Egyptian language, in hieroglyphics, or writing of the priests”; the second inscription in the same language, “in demotic, or the writing of the people”; and the third “in the Greek language and character.”
Then comes a brief biography of the Rosetta Stone itself, as follows: “This stone was found by the French in 1798 among the ruins of Fort St. Julian, near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. It passed into the hands of the British by the treaty of Alexandria, and was deposited in the British Museum in the year 1801.” There is a whole volume of history in that brief inscription, and a bitter sting thrown in, if the reader chance to be a Frenchman. Yet the facts involved could scarcely be suggested more modestly. They are recorded much more bluntly in a graven inscription on the side of the stone, which runs: “Captured in Egypt by the British Army, 1801.” No Frenchman could read those words without a sinking of the heart.
The value of the Rosetta Stone depended on the fact that it gave promise, even when originally inspected, of furnishing a key to the centuries-old mystery of the hieroglyphics. For two thousand years the secret of these strange markings had been forgotten. Nowhere in the world—quite as little in Egypt as elsewhere—had any man the slightest clue to their meaning; there were even those who doubted whether these droll picturings really had any specific meaning, questioning whether they were not merely vague symbols of esoteric religious import and nothing more. And it was the Rosetta Stone that gave the answer to these doubters, and restored to the world a lost language and a forgotten literature.
The trustees of the British Museum recognised that the problem of the Rosetta Stone was one on which the scientists of the world might well exhaust their ingenuity, and they promptly published a carefully lithographed copy of the entire inscription, so that foreign scholarship had equal opportunity with British to try to solve the riddle. How difficult a riddle it was, even with this key in hand, is illustrated by the fact that, though scholars of all nations brought their ingenuity to bear upon it, nothing more was accomplished for a dozen years than to give authority to three or four guesses regarding the nature of the upper inscriptions, which, as it afterwards proved, were quite incorrect and altogether misleading. This in itself is sufficient to show that ordinary scholarship might have studied the Rosetta Stone till the end of time without getting far on the track of its secrets. The key was there, but to apply it required the inspired insight—that is to say, the shrewd guessing power—of genius.
The man who undertook the task had perhaps the keenest scientific imagination and the most versatile profundity of knowledge of his generation—one is tempted to say, of any generation. For he was none other than the extraordinary Dr. Thomas Young, the demonstrator of the vibratory nature of light.
Young had his attention called to the Rosetta Stone by accident, and his usual rapacity for knowledge at once led him to speculate as to the possible aid this tri-lingual inscription might give in the solution of Egyptian problems. Resolving at once to attempt the solution himself, he set to work to learn Koptic, which was rightly believed to represent the nearest existing approach to the ancient Egyptian language. His amazing facility in the acquisition of languages stood him in such good stead that within a year of his first efforts he had mastered Koptic and assured himself that the ancient Egyptian language was really similar to it, and had even made a tentative attempt at the translation of the Egyptian scroll. His results were only tentative, to be sure, yet they constituted the very beginnings of our knowledge regarding the meaning of hieroglyphics. Just how far they carried has been a subject of ardent controversy ever since. Not that there is any doubt about the specific facts; what is questioned is the exact importance of these facts. For it is undeniable that Young did not complete and perfect the discovery, and, as always in such matters, there is opportunity for difference of opinion as to the share of credit due to each of the workers who entered into the discovery.
Young’s specific discoveries were these: (1) that many of the pictures of the hieroglyphics stand for the names of the objects actually delineated; (2) that other pictures are sometimes only symbolic; (3) that plural numbers are represented by repetition; (4) that numerals are represented by dashes; (5) that hieroglyphics may read either from the right or from the left, but always from the direction in which the animals and human figures face; (6) that proper names are surrounded by a graven oval ring, making what he called a cartouche; (7) that the cartouches of the preserved portion of the Rosetta Stone stand for the name of Ptolemy alone; (8) that the presence of a female figure after such cartouches, in other inscriptions, always denotes the female sex; (9) that within the cartouches the hieroglyphic symbols have a positively phonetic value, either alphabetic or syllabic; and (10) that several different characters may have the same phonetic value.