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| My 2023 adventure with the Rosetta Stone! |
The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward DolnickMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I mentally added this book to my TBR stack while standing in the British Museum gift shop two years ago, and it’s possible that I finally picked it up and dove in exactly two years to the day that I saw the Rosetta Stone in person.
I can’t believe that I waited so long, because it was such a wild and fun ride!
So first, of course, you have to decide if you’re rooting for Young or Champollion. Young is the brilliant child phenom whose mental gifts make him good at everything he sets his mind to, but who cannot seem to set his mind fully to anything. He studied, and then revolutionized, apparently every topic that interested him. He discovered, for instance, how the eyeball sees color, but then buried that information in a boring academic article and promptly moved on to a completely new topic, never following up or progressing it or even really bothering to market it. Some other dude sometime later who was interested in the same subject did a literature review and just happened upon the article in which Young had solved his research problem.
So sure, Young did discover how to decode some pharaohs’ names in cartouches, but he moved on before he made another single connection. Hell, he didn’t even clock the connection that he’d literally already made--he thought that “reading” the hieroglyphs that way was just a gimmick they’d made up to enable them to transcribe Greek words!
And then you’ve got Champollion. Champollion was still bright, of course, but he wasn’t bright the way that Young was. Young’s brain could have powered the entirety of France if he’d just harnessed it correctly. Champollion, on the other hand, was dedicated. Devoted. This dude PERSEVERED. As a young man, he put his mind to hieroglyphs, and that’s where his mind stayed until the minute he died. The very minute, too, because he was still working on his dictionary on his deathbed. Champollion had a hunch that the Coptic language might not be simply an iteration of Egyptian, but an actual descendent of the Ancient Egyptian language, so he learned the absolute snot out of Coptic. He studied it SO hard and SO long, and this was back when there weren’t a ton of resources. Once upon a time, a visitor to the Vatican Library noted that someone had been marking up a book in Coptic with a pencil, making marginal notes and such. So they did some more digging and discovered that ALL their books in Coptic were similarly marked up! Come to find out that when Napoleon briefly conquered Italy he’d had the Vatican Library transferred to France for a time, and while it was there Champollion had sniffed out all the Coptic language books and read them, and nobody had noticed because nobody else was interested in Coptic.
So. Are you rooting for the brilliant but flighty phenom or the dogged academic?
As for me, I’m a Champollion gal.
Dolnick’s description of this race is a really fun part of the book, because who doesn’t love niche drama, but my favorite part of the book is how he makes us understand what it actually is to read hieroglyphs. You’re obviously not going to go off from here and start reading tomb walls, but you do understand how to do it, and the idea of a pictorial language is just so neat.
Okay, so you’ve got a hieroglyph, and let’s pretend it’s of a cat. The way hieroglyphs work is that yes, a picture of a cat could mean “cat.” OR it could mean a word that’s a homophone of “cat,” as in, “You’ve been out catting around.” OR it could mean a phoneme that’s part of the word for “cat,” like “C is for Cat,” which will then be followed by hieroglyphs that spell the rest of the word. This makes it a really hard language to learn, because you have to learn so many things that could be “cat,” but after you know the language, it’s a really easy language to read, because there are so many ways to read “cat!” It’s like how red means stop, and an octagon means stop, and “STOP” means stop. It took you longer to learn that each of those things meant stop than it would have to learn that just one thing meant stop, but now it’s so easy to know when you’re supposed to stop. And hieroglyphs will stack that meaning, too, by adding an additional hieroglyph that works as a determinative at the end of some words to specify an interpretation, like the silent “e” determinative that tells you the difference between “mop” and “mope.” You have to learn all those hieroglyphs and what they do to any given word, but then once you know them it’s much easier to read that word.
Everything that Dolnick explains is equally vivid. The Napoleonic Wars are fascinating under his pen, with Napoleon sneaking out of Egypt, the soldiers he left in the dust struggling to rebuild and maintain old forts, one of the workers finding a cool engraved stone in one of those forts, the general in charge falling in love with that engraved stone and sleeping with it under his bed, and that same general pitching an absolute fit at having to give it up to the British after their defeat because he considered it his own personal engraved stone, not France’s.
The time of Ptolemy is equally fascinating. The rulers were Greek because of Alexander the Great--did y’all know that?!? I did not know that. The good part is that pharaohs stopped marrying their sisters for a while (but not forever!), but the bad part is that none of them even knew the Egyptian language, just Greek, which is why they eventually had to send out an engraved stone to tell the populace that they were nevertheless doing the proper Egyptian stuff even though they weren’t properly Egyptian… and they had to put the message in Greek, too, so they could read it.
What I really need to do next is find a good, accessible, super interesting overall history of Ancient Egypt, because the parts of the book that were a deep dive into the history of Ancient Egypt would have made a lot more sense if I’d gone into it understanding how far, for instance, Cleopatra actually was from proper Ancient Egypt: about 3000 years! That’s longer than Cleopatra to US!
Also? Champollion wins.
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