Rock Star: Reading the Rosetta Stone

200 years on from the deciphering of the most famous piece of rock in the world, what does reading the Rosetta Stone reveal?

As the most viewed object at the British Museum, the Rosetta Stone is admired by far more people than were ever expected to see it in ancient times. An infinitesimally small number of those who see it today can actually read any of the three different scripts it carries – Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian and Greek – but perhaps that is as intended. The Rosetta Stone’s ancient purpose and modern magnetism depend on the opacity of its meaning far more than on its legibility as a document.

The colonial context of the acquisition of the Rosetta Stone is succinctly recorded for anyone who might care to look along the left- and right-hand edges of the stone itself, where a fourth script, in English, reads: ‘CAPTURED IN EGYPT BY THE BRITISH ARMY 1801 – PRESENTED BY KING GEORGE III.’

The Rosetta Stone was supposedly first discovered by the Frenchman Pierre-François Bouchard in July 1799, a year after Egypt was invaded by the French army, led by Napoleon Bonaparte in an effort to secure that highly strategic territory. Napoleon sought to control the quickest route from Europe to the British-dominated Asian subcontinent; the Suez Canal would not be completed until 1869.

The ‘stone’ itself is an irregularly shaped slab of dark granitoid rock, weighing around 762kg and measuring more than a metre in height. The work of actually excavating it was probably undertaken by unknown Egyptian labourers as part of the defensive constructions for a French military stronghold at Fort St Julien at the important trading port of el-Rashid (Classical ‘Rosetta’), nine miles south of the Mediterranean coast on an important branch of the Nile.

The stone was not intended for the site whose name it now indelibly bears; the fragment we know today was originally part of a much taller, round-topped stela – or commemorative slab – perhaps set up in a temple at the ancient capital at Sais (Sa el-Hagar), almost 43 miles upriver of el-Rashid. Like so much Pharaonic monumental stone, the block, likely to have been fragmented already, was transported downstream and recycled as building material.

Immediate recognition of the significance of the stone’s inscriptions is conventionally credited to Bouchard. News of the discovery spread quickly. The stone did not remain in French hands for long, never really having been in Egyptian hands at all. It was claimed by the British as war booty in 1801 after their defeat of the French forces that year. But it was the French who made a series of copies of the slab’s inscriptions and it was these widely disseminated facsimiles that would provide the decisive catalyst to the deciphering of the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts, with the French and British competing for philological victory, as they had for control of Egypt itself.

Enlightening expectations

Before the stone’s unearthing, much speculation had concerned the nature of hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphic signs had always been symbolic and somewhat enigmatic, but they became more so as the number of those literate in the script decreased during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Rather than suddenly having fallen out of use as a means of communication, hieroglyphs instead became a rare, arcane script used in religious contexts.

Explications of how such a system ‘worked’ were offered by inheritors of this hieroglyphic tradition not long after active use of the script had ceased, notably by the fifth-century Alexandrian priest Horapollo. Numerous explorations of the meaning of hieroglyphs were later produced by medieval scholars writing in Arabic, as well as significant speculations by the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century. Although these treatises are sometimes still characterised as misguided and eccentric compared with the eventual breakthrough by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, they were in reality more in line with the last recorded (and apparently wilfully arcane) uses of the hieroglyphic script by priests in antiquity.

The stone’s three scripts are often understood as a means of making the inscriptions’ message clear to those who have the ability to read them. But while the carving of such a multilingual text was not unusual, it may not have aimed at simple communication. The last lines of each section stipulate that:

the decree should be written on a stela of hard stone, in sacred writing[hieroglyphs], document writing[demotic]and Greek writing, and it should be set up in the first-class temples, the second-class temples and the third-class temples, next to the statue of the King, living forever.

In the hieroglyphic script, what we call ‘hieroglyphs’ were referred to by the ancient Egyptian term ‘words of the gods’. Given how few people could read them, they may have seemed directly targeted at the primordial deities themselves.

‘Cracking the code’

In modern times hieroglyphs represented a puzzle that invited serious contemplation. Western frustration when faced with the seemingly implacable problem of ‘cracking the code’ is summed up by the Irish writer Bram Stoker in his 1903 novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, in which he describes learned men having ‘wrested open the mysterious prison-house of Egyptian language’. Decipherment has inspired many similar metaphors.

Yet, in the aftermath of Champollion’s crucial 1822 announcement, the tone of Western scholars soon revealed a pervading disappointment about what had actually been revealed. As J.C. Pritchard noted in his Analysis of the Historical Records of Ancient Egypt, published in 1838:

It was at one time very generally expected that the clue afforded by the Rosetta inscription towards the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics and enchorial writings would have led to very important discoveries ... Hitherto little or nothing has been obtained to verify this sanguine hope.

Such hopes for insight into lost knowledge reflected fanciful pre-decipherment speculations about the texts on other objects held in museum collections, especially densely and colourfully inscribed coffins which, it was hoped, might contain extensive biographical information that would allow a reconstruction of the life of the deceased. In fact, most of these funerary texts are highly formulaic and the amount of personal information is extremely limited. It was a typically Western conceit that, by the magical turn of a key, all the hoped-for secrets of the ancients would be unlocked. Ultimately, ancient texts were never written to neatly answer modern research questions.

Regardless of the perceived value of the texts now beginning to be translated, the Rosetta Stone undoubtedly served to establish a European hegemony not just on the study of the ancient Egyptian language but on the understanding of ancient Egyptian culture as a whole. Egyptologists were empowered to act as intermediaries, giving voice to once-silent ‘monstrous curiosities’, as Pharaonic antiquities were unfavourably described in comparison with Classical works in the British Museum before the 1820s.

Yet, rather than a single revelation leading to instant legibility of all hieroglyphic texts, comprehension began gradually with royal names – the non-Egyptian words ‘Ptolemy’ and ‘Cleopatra’ named on the stone were helpfully spelled out phonetically, enclosed in oval-shaped rings known now almost universally by the French term cartouche. Since then, understandings of the various phases of the Egyptian language have continued to develop and diversify.

For all its significance in the grand narrative of decipherment the importance of the Rosetta Stone transcends its role in Egyptology alone. Clearly the stone’s appeal goes beyond its rather dull aesthetic; the sales of products using the image – postcards, prints, clothing, jigsaw puzzles – in the British Museum shop attest to that. Knowledge of and interest in the Rosetta Stone has for