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The Stone That Spoke Three Ways

True story · 3 min read

In July 1799, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the Egyptian town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, pulled a slab of dark stone out of the rubble. It was about the size of a coffee table. Carved across it were three bands of writing.

The bottom band was ancient Greek, which scholars could read. They worked through it quickly. It was a decree issued by priests in 196 BCE honoring the young king Ptolemy V, and the last lines said a copy should stand in every temple, inscribed in three scripts: the sacred writing, the everyday writing of Egypt, and Greek.

That sentence was a gift. If the three bands said the same thing, then the Greek was a key to the other two. The sacred script was hieroglyphs, and nobody alive had been able to read hieroglyphs for about fourteen centuries.

For twenty years the best minds in Europe tried and failed. The mistake most of them made was a natural one. Hieroglyphs look like pictures: an eye, a bird, a reed. So scholars assumed each sign stood for an idea, a kind of picture-puzzle. That route led nowhere.

An English polymath, Thomas Young, made the first real breakthrough with the hieroglyphic band. He took up an older hunch that the oval rings in the writing, called cartouches, held royal names, and matched one to Ptolemy. He recognized that some signs were phonetic, standing for sounds. That was an important step. But he stopped there, convinced that sound-signs were used only for foreign names like Ptolemy, and that ordinary Egyptian words worked differently.

A young Frenchman, Jean-François Champollion, took the next step. He had loved Egypt since he was a boy and had learned Coptic, the last descendant of the Egyptian language. He compared the Ptolemy cartouche on the stone with another, from an obelisk, which he believed spelled Cleopatra. The two names shared some letters, and the signs for those letters matched. A sound was a sound, wherever it appeared.

Then he turned to cartouches that were not Greek names at all. One began with a sun disc, which in Coptic he knew was "Ra," followed by a sign he read as "ms" and two identical signs for "s". Ra-ms-s: Rameses. In another, a bird, the ibis of the god Thoth, followed by the "ms" sign made Thothmes. These were native Egyptian names, and sound signs were doing part of the spelling. The Englishman had said that could not be.

Hieroglyphs, Champollion realized, worked in more than one way at once. Some signs stood for sounds, like an alphabet. Some stood for whole words. Some were silent markers that told you what kind of word you were reading. That is why the problem had resisted solving for so long: the system was a mixture, and each earlier theory had been right about one part and wrong about the rest.

In September 1822 he announced it in a letter to a colleague. A famous story says that when he first understood, he ran to his brother's office, shouted that he had it, and fainted. It may be true, or it may be a story that grew with telling. What is certain is that he spent the next ten years reading everything Egypt had written.

The Rosetta Stone gave Champollion a place to start and a pair of names to test his idea against. The nerve to try again when the old idea failed was his own.

Words in this story: decree, cartouche, hieroglyph, Coptic, phonetic