#11: A Bridge Across Time
An ancient gift to future scholars ...
On July 15, 1799, under the searing heat of the Egyptian sun, a detachment of French soldiers was strengthening the foundations of an old fortification near Rosetta, a port city of the Nile Delta. As the men were digging, one of the soldiers, an officer named Pierre-François Bouchard, spotted an unusual slab of dark stone. It was quite large, more than three-and-a-half feet long at its widest point, and its weight topped 1,600 pounds. As Bouchard examined the smooth surface of the weathered granodiorite slab more closely, he saw it was covered in writing: small, delicately chiseled scripts.
At the top, indecipherable to any living person on Earth, were hieroglyphics, the ceremonial language of the Ancient Egyptians — a complex arrangement of birds, ankhs, and other arcane symbols. The archaic script had been out of use for more than a millennium and was a mystery even to the most learned linguist or historian, let alone this detachment of Napoleon’s invading soldiers.
Beneath the hieroglyphics was a second inscription in Demotic, a later and less formal form of Egyptian writing — only partially understood by academics of the era. And then there was yet a third inscription, this one in Ancient Greek, a well-preserved language that had been studied and taught by theologians and other scholars for centuries.
Bouchard and his superior officer, Colonel d'Hautpoul, quickly realized that the discovery was important and reported it up the chain of command. French engineer Michel Ange Lancret, a member of a scientific commission appointed by Napoleon to accompany the Egyptian campaign, correctly surmised that the mysterious stone contained three translations of the same text.
The rest, as they say, is history. What Bouchard had discovered was not merely a two-thousand-year-old relic. It was a stone bridge across time itself — one that would finally give voice to a once vibrant and bustling civilization, long silent.
What would come to be known as the Rosetta Stone dates back to March of 196 B.C., the ninth year of the reign of King Ptolemy V. More than two thousand years after the construction of the Great Pyramid by Khufu of the Old Kingdom, after defeating the Persians at the Battle of Issus, the Macedonian Greek conqueror Alexander the Great marched south and took control of Egypt in 332 B.C., laying the foundations for the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Ptolemy V was a descendant of Ptolemy I Soter, among Alexander’s most trusted generals. The black stone was a priestly decree that affirmed Ptolemy V’s divine right to rule.
I find it fascinating to contemplate that this stele, as it is called, was not particularly interesting or special at the time of its creation. Other copies are now known to exist. It was standard propaganda, an administrative mandate to be reproduced and displayed at temples throughout Egypt, likely of no more interest to the populace than a poster on the wall of a modern-day government office. But because the decree was issued in three languages, its authors unwittingly provided a priceless gift to future scholars. One of the greatest of all linguistic mysteries, the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic text — referred to by its creators as medu netjer, or the “words of the gods,” — could finally be unraveled.
This linguistic breakthrough was much more than the resurrection of a dead language. “I think the Rosetta Stone is really the key, not simply to ancient Egypt; it’s the key to decipherment itself,” said author and Egyptologist John Ray of Cambridge University, interviewed by Smithsonian. “You’ve got to think back to before it was discovered. All we knew about the ancient world was Greece, Rome and the Bible. We knew there were big civilizations, like Egypt, but they’d fallen silent. With the cracking of the Rosetta Stone, they could speak with their own voice and suddenly whole areas of history were revealed.”
It didn’t happen overnight (the detective work of Frenchman Jean-François Champollion deserves its own column) but historians could soon read temple inscriptions, legal documents, and personal correspondence from more than three millennia of Egyptian history. The story of this extraordinary civilization’s rise and evolution, its agriculture, religion, government, art, architecture — all of this would eventually become an open book to scholars who before had found its secrets impenetrable. It’s no wonder that the marvelous Rosetta Stone, now housed in the British Museum, has become a symbol of how language, when deciphered, connects humanity to its past and the universal hallmarks of human experience: our desire for influence, for faith, for connection, and perhaps most of all, our longing to leave our mark upon the world.
The Rosetta Stone is a monument to the impermanent power of one dead king, but also to the everlasting might of human communication. It is a key that opens the door to an ancient era, and an enduring reminder that with patience, curiosity, and a desire to learn, even the most inscrutable mysteries are waiting for us to reveal them.