“Such is the British Obelisk, unique, grand, and symbolical, which devotion reared upward to the sun ere many empires of the West had emerged from obscurity. It was ancient at the foundation of the city of Rome, and even old when the Greek empire was in its cradle. Its history is lost in the clouds of mythology long before the rise of the Roman power. To Solomon’s Egyptian bride the Needle must have been an ancestral monument; to Pythagoras and Solon a record of a traditional past antecedent to all historical recollection. In the college near the obelisk, Moses, the meekest of all men, learned the wisdom of the Egyptians. When, after the terrible last plague, the mixed multitude of the Israelites were driven forth from Egypt, the light of the pillar of fire threw the shadow of the obelisk across the path of the fugitives. Centuries later, when the wrecked empire of Judæa was dispersed by the king of Babylon, it was again in the precincts of the obelisk of On that the exiled people of the Lord took shelter. Upon how many scenes has that monolith looked!” Amid the changes of many dynasties and the fall of mighty empires it is still preserved to posterity, and now rises in our midst—the most venerable and the most valuable relic of the infancy of the world.
“This British Obelisk,” says Dean Stanley, “will be a lasting memorial of those lessons which are taught by the Good Samaritan. What does it tell us as it stands, a solitary heathen stranger, amidst the monuments of our English Christian greatness—near to the statues of our statesmen, under the shadow of our Legislature, and within sight of the precincts of our Abbey? It speaks to us of the wisdom and splendour which was the parent of all past civilization, the wisdom whereby Moses made himself learned in all the learning of the Egyptians for the deliverance and education of Israel—whence the earliest Grecian philosophers and the earliest Christian Fathers derived the insight which enabled them to look into the deep things alike of Paganism and Christianity. It tells us—so often as we look at its strange form and venerable characters—that ‘the Light which lighteneth every man’ shone also on those who raised it as an emblem of the beneficial rays of the sunlight of the world. It tells us that as true goodness was possible in the outcast Samaritan, so true wisdom was possible even in the hard and superstitious Egyptians, even in that dim twilight of the human race, before the first dawn of the Hebrew Law or of the Christian Gospel.”
CHAPTER V.
How the Hieroglyphic Language was Recovered.
On the triumph of Christianity, the idolatrous religion of the ancient Egyptians was regarded with pious abhorrence, and so in course of time the hieroglyphics became neglected and forgotten. Thus for fifteen centuries the hieroglyphic inscriptions that cover tombs, temples, and obelisks were regarded as unmeaning characters. Thousands of travellers traversed the land of Egypt, and yet they never took the trouble to copy with accuracy a single line of an inscription. The monuments of Egypt received a little attention about the middle of the eighteenth century, and vague notions of the nature of hieroglyphs were entertained by Winckelman, Visconti, and others. Most of their suggestions are of little value; and it was not until the publication of the description of ancient Egypt by the first scientific expedition under Napoleon that the world regained a glimpse of the true nature of the long-forgotten hieroglyphs.
In 1798 M. Boussard discovered near Rosetta, situated at one of the mouths of the Nile, a large polished stone of black granite, known as “The Rosetta Stone.” This celebrated monument it appears was set up in the temple of Tum at Heliopolis about 200 B.C., in honour of Ptolemy V., according to a solemn decree of the united priesthood in synod at Memphis. On its discovery, the stone was presented to the French Institute at Cairo; but on the capture of Alexandria by the British in 1801, and the consequent defeat of the French troops, the Rosetta Stone came into the possession of the English general, and was presented by him to King George III. The king in turn presented the precious relic to the nation, and the stone is now in safe custody in the British Museum.
The Rosetta Stone.