THE ROSETTA STONE
So what is the Rosetta stone?
I have always been fascinated by it for two reasons. It was a true battle between French and British during the 19th century but with Chivalry and no one died. Who created it?
The fact relates that whoever created it was on the same quest that we were on in the modern era. The Rosettta stone was found at the very top of Egypt. It is a totally unique piece of material. Carved on it are hieroglyphs, but also Greek and a Demotic script. It was carved in 196BC and is about a decree of King Ptolemy.
Mike with the Rosetta Stone
This meant that upon it’s discovery in 1799 by one of Napoleans soldiers that hieroglyphs, which had been a mystery to the modern world for millennia could be translated… why… because we could read ancient greek, and if we could do that then we could read the strange symbols of the egyptian past. The race was on between the French, headed by the academic and elderly Champollion and the English and much younger Thomas Young, who eventually cracked the code by a very small margin.
It wasn’t a simple thing to do the translations because you are of course assuming that ancient egyptian reads left to right. Yet in fact it can read in any direction, 4 directions to be fair. Finally it was done, allowing us to read the beautiful inscriptions all over egypt from all time, including the Book of the Dead at Saqqara, the most stunning and most ancient text of all.
So let’s wrap this up with a question and a piece of truth very few people know. The question - Did the Ancient Greeks that translated this stone know what they were doing? If not, then maybe we have hieroglyphs all wrong.
At the British Museum for the 'Ancient Civilizations Exhibition'
Remember that this was unlikely to be an academic peer reviewed piece of work, maybe it was just a hobby in someones back yard, and we are basing the whole knowledge of egypt on that Egyptian Heiroglyphs are 3 dimensional. If you stare at them, particularly something like the list of kings on the wall at Abydos, they come alive. They become like an old animated picture. Think Mickey Mouse circa 1928. In 2014, we had a whole group use diffusion and convergence and many of the group jumped in shock as they released the wall came alive in front of them.
So have we got it right or is the Rosetta stone simply leading us in an entirely wrong path?