THE ROSETTA STONE

The expressions given above occur on the famous Rosetta Stone, an inscribed slab of black basalt, which has proved to be of priceless value in supplying the key to the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, thus fulfilling a purpose corresponding to that of the Behistun rock inscriptions in the interpretation of cuneiform writing. The slab—which is preserved in the British Museum—takes its name from its discovery among the ruins of a fort near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, where it was found by a French officer in 1799. On the capitulation of Alexandria to the British, the stone, whose importance had been detected by the savants attached, by the foresight of Napoleon, to his expedition, came by good fortune under the charge of Sir William Hamilton, whose interest in Egyptian antiquities was keen. It is not perfect, but enough has survived to suffice for decipherment of the general tenor of the inscriptions. Speculation as to the meaning of the hieroglyphs had been rife for centuries, for although they remained in use one hundred and fifty years after the Ptolemies began to reign (305 b.c.), and although the names of Roman emperors were written in them as late as the third century a.d., only a few among the classical writers whose works we possess have anything of value to say on the matter. It was not until the early decades of the present century that the ingenuity of two Egyptologists, Young and Champollion, working independently (as, years later, Adams and Leverrier worked at the problem of the discovery of Neptune), wrested their secret from the hieroglyphs. Honour lies only in lesser degree with some immediate predecessors, among them ZoËga, who rightly conjectured that the oblong rings enclosed royal names, because these "cartouches," as they are called, appeared above the series of sitting figures in temple sculptures; and Akerblad, who published an alphabet of the demotic characters on the Rosetta Stone.

Dr. Thomas Young was a very remarkable man. Born of Quaker parents in 1773, he gave his youth to literature, languages, and mechanics, and at thirty won the Fellowship of the Royal Society, having two years before then accepted the Professorship of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. Made easy in circumstances by a legacy from a relative, he applied himself yet more strenuously to physics and philology. The result of his labours in the one was the discovery of the undulatory nature of light (which has its analogy in sound-waves), in opposition to Newton's corpuscular or emission theory; and, in the other, a partial decipherment of the demotic characters, and correct identification of the names of a few of the Egyptian gods—Ra, Nut, Thoth, Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys—and of the names Ptolemy and Berenice. He died in 1829.

Jean FranÇois Champollion, of whom Dr. Wallis Budge speaks as "the immortal discoverer of a correct system of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics," was born in 1790. Like Young, he betook himself early to the study of languages, and at the age of thirteen was "master of a fair knowledge of Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee." In his twenty-second year he became Professor of Ancient History to the Faculty of Letters at Grenoble, and, with a certain impulse to the quest given by acquaintance with the labours of Young and others, he revised their system and developed his own, making tours to the museums of Turin, Rome, and Naples for the study of papyri, and passing thence to Egypt, where he secured a large body of materials. Death overtook him in 1832, but not before he had accomplished the chief aim of his life in demonstrating that the hieroglyphic characters are partly pictures of objects and partly signs of sounds.

Although the Rosetta Stone was the base of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the success following Champollion's labours is largely due to the discovery of a small obelisk in the island of PhilÆ. This obelisk was said to have been fixed in a socket bearing a Greek inscription containing a petition of the priests of Isis at PhilÆ, addressed to Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his sister, and to Cleopatra his wife. The hieroglyphic inscription upon the obelisk itself included certain characters within a cartouche which were identical with those within the only cartouche occurring on the Rosetta Stone. Here, then, was a clue, which was the more easily followed up because the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra have, in the Greek, certain letters in common which could be used for comparison with the hieroglyphics. "If the characters which are similar in these two names express the same sound in each cartouche, their purely phonetic character is at once made clear," and the recovery of the Egyptian alphabet was only a question of time (Figs. 47, 48, 49).

The Rosetta Stone is inscribed with fragments of fourteen lines of hieroglyphics, thirty-two lines of demotic, and fifty-four lines of Greek. These have for their subject-matter a decree of the priesthood assembled at Memphis in honour of Ptolemy V. Epiphanes, King of Egypt, b.c. 195. They set forth the beneficent deeds of that monarch, in his consecration of revenues of silver and corn to the temples, his abolition of certain taxes and reduction of others, his grant of privileges to the priests and soldiers, and his undertaking at his own cost, in the eighth year of his reign, when the Nile rose to so great a height as to flood all the plains, the task of damming it and directing the overflow of its waters into proper channels, to the great gain and benefit of the agricultural classes. Besides his remissions of taxes, he gave handsome gifts to the temples, and subscribed to the various ceremonies connected with public worship. In return for these gracious acts, the priests assembled at Memphis decreed that a statue of the king should be set up in a conspicuous place in every temple of Egypt, and inscribed with the names and titles of "Ptolemy, the saviour of Egypt." Royal apparel was to be placed on the statues, and ceremonies were to be performed before them three times a day. It was also decreed that a gilded wooden shrine, containing a gilded wooden statue of the king, should be placed in each temple, and that these were to be carried out with the shrines of the other kings in the great panegyrics. It was also decreed that ten golden crowns of a peculiar design should be made and laid upon the royal shrine; that the birthday and coronation day of the king should be celebrated each year with great pomp and show; that the first five days of the month of Thoth should each year be set apart for the performance of a festival in honour of the king; and, finally, that a copy of this decree, engraved upon a tablet of hard stone in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek Characters, should be set up in each of the temples of the first, second, and third orders, near the statue of the ever-living Ptolemy. Dr. Wallis Budge adds that "the Greek portion of the inscriptions appears to be the original document, and the hieroglyphic and demotic versions merely translations of it." (The Mummy, pp. 110, 111.)

As the principle of interpretation is the same for all the inscriptions, and as the key to that interpretation is knowledge of one of the languages in which the inscription occurs, brief reference to another historical tablet often bracketed with the Rosetta Stone will suffice. This is known as the Stele of Canopus, which also bears inscriptions in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. It is about half a century earlier than the Rosetta Stone, and was set up at Canopus in the ninth year of the reign of Ptolemy III. to record a decree made by the priesthood there assembled in honour of the king. It recites acts similar in their beneficent character to those recounted of Ptolemy V., and decrees what honours shall be paid him and his consort Berenice, whose famous hair, dedicated in the temple of ArsinoË at Zephyrium in gratitude for Ptolemy's safe return from his Syrian expedition, was said to have been metamorphosed into the constellation known as Coma Berenices.