Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rosetta Stone

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

In 1798, the young French General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt. After successfully taking Alexandria, he ordered the reconstruction of a fort at the nearby city of Rosetta. As his soldiers did the back-breaking work of digging fortifications in the blazing sun, they uncovered an archaeological treasure that would prove to be the key to Egypt's past - the Rosetta Stone.Dan is joined by Egyptologist and writer Dr Chris Naunton to tell us what exactly was written on this vital relic, and why it mattered.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Max Carrey.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In 1797, much of Western Europe was aflame. In a lightning campaign of less than two years, a young genius, Napoleon Bonaparte, had smashed the enemies of the French Revolution in Italy. He had pretty much knocked Austria out of the war by threatening the capital city, Vienna, itself. Now, by subduing France's really most implacable enemy,

he'd helped to secure the French revolutionary regime. He protected it from his enemies abroad and, to a certain extent, at home as well. Now, Napoleon definitely let this go to his head. He talked about himself as the new Alexander. And once the situation in Europe looked a little more secure, well, he thought he would like to ply his trade on that biggest of stages. The ground where Alexander himself had once trod. The Near East, Egypt, Syria. He would carve out an empire for France just as Alexander or Julius Caesar or Pompey had done before.

Northern Italy was one thing. The Near East was quite another. It was international standard. And in creating that empire, he would break Britain's hold on the Eastern Mediterranean, where Britain had very strong influence, strong trading networks, and he would then advance across Asia, march into India,

and tear the subcontinent from Britain's grasp. I mean, you have to give it to the man. He was backing himself. But he did manage to persuade the French government, I think some of whom were rather glad to see the back of him, sending him off on this insanely risky mission from which the young buck may well not return. Seemed like quite a good gamble to some of them. And he managed to advance down the Nile, but quite rapidly things started to go wrong. He landed near Alexandria, he captured

that great city. You can listen to our podcast we recently recorded in Alexandria about that amazing city and its history. He marched south along the Nile towards the pyramids in Cairo. Before he left the coast, he ordered a stout fort to be built at Rosetta, which is the port at the point at which the Nile empties out into the Mediterranean. And it's a place that he hoped would supply some security to his fleet. As that building was underway, he marched south, he captured Cairo. It was the end of July 1801. Egypt was his, and he had about a week to enjoy it, because the Royal Navy entered the chat days later. At the beginning of August, another superstar young military commander, Horatio Nelson, glided in to the shallow waters of the Egyptian coast.

The night before, he predicted that within 24 hours he would have a peerage or Westminster Abbey, meaning he would be an ennobled military hero or a dead one. And so it was that actually in the afternoon of the 1st of August, his ships engaged the French fleet, which was an anchor on the Egyptian coast at a place called Aboukir Bay. Standing astride the quarterdeck of HMS Vanguard, he stunned the French by venturing into uncharted, shallow waters surrounding and annihilating them.

Napoleon's campaign? Well, it pretty much collapsed. Denied his maritime communication link with France, his ability to get reinforcements or evacuate. He had no real choice. He tried to march overland home via Constantinople, but he was stopped by an Anglo-Turkish force on the coast of what is now Israel.

That's another podcast for you there. Can't wait to tell you that one. And he abandoned his army to its fate. So well done, Napoleon, the great military genius. He sped home in a nippy little blockade runner, a little frigate, and his army were left behind in Egypt. They surrendered, and as they did so, they handed over their haul of loot, or rather carefully curated, ancient Egyptian antiquities to the

British. Rather than dealing the British a decisive blow, it was the British who gained the most from Napoleon's campaign in the Near East. Among the loot that the French handed over to the British was a big stone with some writing on it. It had been found in Rosetta as the French had been building their fort there. It didn't look very precious, but in fact it was one of the most vital and exciting archaeological objects ever discovered. Here to tell me about the importance of the Rosetta Stone is Chris Naunton, one of our favourite Egyptologists. He's a writer and broadcaster and expert on all things ancient Egypt. He's going to tell us just what was

written on that stone and why it mattered. Enjoy....dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Chris Naunton, thank you for coming back on the podcast. It's my pleasure, Dan. Always.

We need to talk about the most exciting bit of decoding in history, the Rosetta Stone. What is it? What is it? It's a giant lump of stone with an inscription on the front of it, which provided the key to allow scholars to decipher the ancient Egyptian language. But the weird thing is, it's not ancient Egyptian. So the inscription is written three times. It's written in ancient Greek. It's also written in ancient Egyptian language in two different ancient Egyptian scripts, one of them being Demotic, which is a kind of equivalent of your handwriting, your kind of handwritten form, the cursive script. And the other one is the much more formal script, which we're all much more

familiar with, which is hieroglyphs, which is what everybody wanted to be able to decipher. So based on the idea that the three scripts write the same thing, just in those different scripts, different languages, and given that ancient Greek could be read, the scholars set about trying to look for correspondences between the Greek text, which they could read, and the Egyptian texts, which they couldn't. And that set off the process of decipherment. I guess what I mean is that the stone isn't ancient Egyptian. We'd call it the period in which the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty, ruled over Egypt. Well, that's where you draw your line, I suppose, Dan. So yes, it's Ptolemaic, which means that it was created and set up during the reign of one of the Ptolemies, one of the successors of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy V.

And for some people, that period is a bit late for proper ancient Egypt. For other people, it's every bit as ancient. You know, the Ptolemies, as Alexander himself was, were pharaohs of Egypt. For other people, it's every bit as ancient. You know, the Ptolemies, as Alexander himself was, were pharaohs of Egypt. They were the hereditary monarchs of the country. For me, it's ancient Egyptian. Okay, so we can call it an ancient Egyptian artifact. Why did they carve these three things? Does it show that it's like a road sign in Wales or Quebec? It's a multilingual country, and there were public announcements in all the different scripts.

Yeah, precisely. Yeah, exactly. So it records a decree in this case. To be quite honest, not a terribly interesting inscription as these things go. Basically, it sets down the fact that there was an agreement between the pharaoh of the time, Ptolemy V, and the priests, recognizing the cult of the king, recognizing that the king was a legitimate god, and decreeing that a statue of the king would be set up in the major temples around the country to recognize his divine status.

And also that the decree itself, or a copy of this text, would be set up in the major temples around the country to recognise his divine status, and also that the decree itself, or a copy of this text, would be set up in all these various different places as well. So this was in fact one of just a series of copies of this text. And you're absolutely right, part of the character of the Ptolemaic period, this ancient but you're absolutely right, late, very late ancient period, is a time when, while most of the ordinary people in the country would still have spoken Egyptian, and while hieroglyphs were still in use and demotic, this cursive script was in use, the major administrative language of the time and the language of the rulers of the time, the Ptolemies, was ancient Greek. So in order that this could be understood by everybody, it was kind of mandatory

that you write important things like this down in those two languages. It tells us, I guess, a lot about government and society in Ptolemaic Egypt, but also it was provided the key that allowed you to decipher hieroglyphs. So exciting. Well, it is, yeah. yeah i mean little could they have known that by recording this as i say not terribly exciting decree and setting it up everywhere just like any old you know decree that that and then the chance survival of this particular stone which by the way comes about because in the medieval period, a long time after anyone had stopped caring what this said, and indeed stopped being able to read the Egyptian part of it at least,

the stone was reused in the foundations of a medieval fortification. So by that point, the value of this thing was just that it was a chunky piece of stone that could be used to erect a building on top of. And that, of course, has the effects of preserving it. So when that building was being rebuilt by Napoleon's armies, they discovered this thing and realised, no, hang on though, it is useful in propping a building up, but also some stuff written on it, maybe we should dig this out.

And before we come on to that more recent history, just the last thing about the message on the stone. You say it's not particularly important, and you and I have laughed before about how frustrating I find hieroglyphs all over Egyptian tombs, because they don't tell you anything about the biographical details of the pharaoh. They don't tell you the battles. The Greeks, the Romans are so lovely.

The Romans put up one little rubbish outhouse, and they tell you who the consul was, why it was put up. It was, you know, the particular military event that it succeeded. Anyway, and those hieroglyphs all over Tutankhamen's tomb and all those other tombs

that people are familiar with, Amenhotep, Thothmosis, they don't say anything. They're just endless religious screeds. Anyway. Yes. The Rosetta Stone, does it give us a sense

in which it's the new Greek rulers going, look, render unto Caesar, I will respect the traditional Egyptian priesthood and religious practices, but I'd kind of want you in return to acknowledge my overlordship, or am I being too optimistic there? No, actually, no. I've been too cynical, Dan. I think that's the problem. Maybe that's my role in life, if not only in this conversation. No, you're absolutely right. No, it does embody an essential part of the character of the period, which is that, and again, you're right here, this is a late-ish period of ancient Egypt. When Egypt has come to be ruled by non-Egyptians, the last native rulers of Egypt have gone. They're

in the past by this point. And the Ptolemies, as we've said, not only was Greek their administrative language, but in all cases, bar the very last of the line, the very famous Cleopatra, who, according to all the sources, was actually able to speak Egyptian. She was unique in that, among that line of rulers. So they were Greek speakers. These are foreign invaders who had taken the country over, and they brought with them a kind of an elite. So not only is Greek important in that respect, but also it does sort of set them up in opposition to the Egyptian people, and particularly the priesthood, who saw themselves as the guardians of the Egyptian way of doing things. So they remain very powerful. Temples are very powerful.

They're very powerful economically. They control huge amounts of land. So the pharaohs, the Ptolemaic pharaohs, on the one hand, they are in charge, but they can't really run the country without the blessing of the priest. And the decree, much as I say it's a little bit boring, is an embodiment of that. It is an agreement between the king and the priest. I'll give you this, I'll recognise you and I'll make endowments and I'll give you a bit of money to rebuild this or that, but you've got to recognise me as the rightful ruler and indeed as a semi-god. So there is a trade-off here and you're absolutely right, that is an essential part of the character, particularly of this period. You're absolutely right.

That is an essential part of the character, particularly of this period. It's like an interesting piece of history from Ptolemaic Egypt, but it's an absolute blockbuster when it comes to being able to decipher these hieroglyphs. Before then, before it was discovered, what did people think hieroglyphs were? Just sort of pretty pictures? I mean, they knew it was presumably a writing system.

Did they have any way of getting inside it and working it out? Not really, no. Various people had had a go, but for the most part, I mean, one or two scholars had at least got to grips with the question of whether the hieroglyphic script is either purely symbolic, in other words, the little signs, and you'll be familiar with these, you know, men and birds and other little sort of pictures of recognisable things from the natural environment or whatever, whether those things are used to write those concepts so does it does a sign for a bird mean a bird or or does it represent something else like the and the other way of doing things there's the symbolic system on one on the one hand on the other hand there's a kind of phonetic system so does a bird sign actually encode the sounds in

the way that our own alphabet encodes sounds and some had started to get to grips with this but without a rosetta stone they couldn't get very far and and of course that on the symbolic side when it comes to the phonetic side it's very difficult to sort of imagine what the sounds might might be on the symbolic side people who wanted to read particular meanings into these things could really go to town and there are entire books that were written prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, basically guessing at what the symbols might mean and often guessing with preconceived ideas about religion and the nature of the universe and that sort of thing.

You'd feel such a chump if your life's work had just aged 75 and you're just saying, oh, I might retire now. And someone came and disproved your entire life work, dug out of a hole in the ground in Egypt. Oh, horror. So the French have invaded Egypt somewhat bizarrely. This is actually a very happy mashup

of your happy place and my happy place, 18th century naval history and military history. Napoleon strikes Egypt, partly because of his grandiose plans to emulate the conquerors of ancient the ancient world partly because he wants to get to india and buy land because he can't get there by seags the royal navy and undo the british grip on india but in egypt they're doing all sorts of surveying and and looking at and and become fascinated by egyptology they're enlarging a

fort are they they're building something so and they find this stone. And how quickly does it become clear this is absolutely a vital relic? I mean, more or less immediately, I think. We don't have a lot of detail on that, you know, from the very first moment that the soldiers are digging and somebody goes, well, wait a sec, there's some inscriptions on that. But it is a soldier who uh who identifies it a man called bouchard who who is at least aware that you know this being inscribed could be significant he must he must have quickly been aware that it's not it's not just a few signs it's a very lengthy text

and he may well have recognized because it doesn't take an enormous amount of scholarship to recognize ancient greek characters i think not certainly not in those days especially not if you were officer class i guess yeah and the the fortress is strategically important because it's just just slightly inland from the point at which um the rosetta branch of the nile meets the mediterranean so for the french approaching egypt from the mediterranean and looking for strategic points at which to build fortresses. Just as their medieval predecessors had done, they realised that the point at which the river meets the ocean is a great sort of point. And yeah, apparently Bouchard recognises this. The French have brought with them, as you will know very well, not just soldiers, but scholars,

artists, scientists, this kind of thing, to make this grand description of Egypt. And they were building a collection of antiquities. So they were looking for stuff like this. And presumably Bouchard thought, well, maybe that's a thing we should have. Maybe of all the stones that we're about to build our new fortress on top of, maybe we should just take that one and put it on one side and just see what people say. And sure enough, it makes its way into the collection, their growing collection of antiquities. And there's no question they just thought, we'll just take it all home with us.

That didn't cross their mind. There was nothing weird about just nicking all this stuff. No, sadly, in those days, I mean, I guess if you think it's okay to just go to somebody else's country and start firing your rifles and taking over for your own country's economic and political territorial gain then probably it does seem fair enough that if there's just you know interesting stones lying around that you can put into your national collection back home for the glory of your nation showing your sort of superiority over everybody else then sure and of course it wasn't only the french that were doing this kind of thing at least for the next couple of decades there was an awful lot of this

and once people realized that there was sort of fantastically interesting treasures as it were to be to be had more or less literally lying around then the only barrier was whether or not you could shift these things. And of course, some of these inscribed blocks of stone are extremely difficult to move. Had they not been, probably an awful lot more would have gone, as awful as that seems. Listen to Dan Snow's history. Talk about the Rosetta Stone.

Listen to Dan Snow's history. Talk about the Rosetta Stone. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The Stone is immediately seen as important. The Stone then, like so much in the 18th century, becomes a football fought over by the British and the French. Yeah. A story repeated across nearly every continent.

Who ends up with it? Well, every continent. Who ends up with it? Well, what happens and who ends up with it? Well, you will probably know the modern historical story of this better than I do. Well, I mean, first of all, Napoleon's ships are stationed off the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. And once the Brits get wind of the fact that that's where Napoleon's fleet and armies have gone, they pursue them under Admiral Nord Nelson, I believe. The French ships are destroyed, leaving the armies marooned. And although it takes three or four years, Egypt is a part of the property of the Ottoman Empire at this point. So not only

are the Brits not very pleased because they are arch enemies, the French have sort of struck a blow, but the Ottomans aren't so really happy either because Egypt is meant to be theirs. So a coalition of British and Ottoman forces defeat Napoleon's armies, and there's a bit of to-ing and fro-ing. Part of that agreement, the British take possession of the collection of antiquities that the French had been building up. So for that reason, the Rosetta Stone and all these other things pass into the hands of the British. So it's the British that end up bringing these things home. And that is how the Rosetta Stone comes to be. Not in the Louvre in Paris, where it was probably going to end up, had Napoleon been more successful, but in the British Museum in London instead. Is there now a race? Is that the starting gun now to try and work out what the hieroglyphs mean? How long did it take?

Yes, pretty much. And actually, on a sort of happier note, when it comes to geopolitics and antagonism between nations, the scholars who were involved in this actually were quite happy to exchange, at least to begin with, ideas and copies. So although the stone is in London, in Britain, and there were British scholars who were interested in this, copies of the text were made available to scholars in France. And in fact, it's the French scholars who make most of the early running, at least. And eventually, of course, it's a French scholar who would get the whole project over the line, as it were. And who was that? And how long did it take him? Well, I suppose I should say, it's a bit of a myth that there is a great point at which the

code is cracked. You know, we use words like decipher and cracking the code and that kind of thing. And we've all done those kind of puzzles when we were younger, where, I don't know, letters equal numbers. So A is one and B is two. And as long as you know what the cipher is, then you can crack the encoded inscription. Egyptian doesn't quite work like that. And our knowledge of how to read it and understand it is still imperfect. But there does come a point, about 20 years, it does take as much as 20 years after the stone made its way from Egypt to Europe, when one particular scholar, Jean-Francois Champollion, a Frenchman, a brilliant, genius linguist, reaches the point at which he has cracked enough, if you like, of the system to be able to say, I think, with this knowledge of how it works in mind, I can go to any inscription you like and make sense of it. And his knowledge was still imperfect, but he had got the whole thing

over the line. And he'd made a series of brilliant deductions, essentially leaps of imagination and educated guesswork that got him from the point where, as with other scholars, he was really kind of guessing and getting things wrong, to the point where he's consistently able to understand the words and get the sense of text. In some ways, that's the beginning of Egyptology. It's the single most important moment in Egyptology. The floodgates are open at that point. Well, that's an interesting point. Without reading hieroglyphs, would we know who Ramesses is? I mean, what's their historiography? I mean, do these people appear in Herodotus or the Bible? What do we know about the Battle of Megiddo, Thutmose, Hatshepsut? Was it as opaque

as, for example, the Inca civilization remains to us today? I think it pretty much was, yeah. And it's interesting now, actually, that you will know this, Dan, if you go down to somewhere like Luxor, you may well have passed by or had a look at the supposed Colossi of Memnon. That name is a name that was given to those statues by classical writers in Greek and Roman times, and which has stuck down to the present day. Even though it's hopelessly anachronistic. Even though it's hopelessly wrong. I mean, you might as well call the statue of any sort of great soldier or politician in London, you know, without being able to read what it says,

you might as well just imagine Father Christmas or, you know, Moses or, you know, it's total guesswork. We now know, thanks to Champollion, that those statues are statues of the 18th dynasty king, Amenhotep III. But without that kind of thing, they really were totally in the dark. And so there were classical writers, Strabo, Herodotus, you're right, the Bible provides a little, tiny, tiny little fragments of information. You can imagine that after a couple of centuries,

even if we couldn't read the text, scholars might have been able to make a decent stab at arranging monuments, say, into sequence according to the way that artistic styles develop or something like that, or maybe, you know, basing on some of these other histories. But, you know, really, it's impossible to overstate how important this moment is when the text can be read, because suddenly you can attribute monuments to the reigns of particular kings, if nothing else. Because we did have lists in Egyptian and in later languages as well, you can then arrange those into order. And suddenly you've got a history where previously it was the garbled stories of Herodotus and Cogh.

Amazing. And are we confident that we've cracked it? If you went back to ancient Egypt, would you be able to understand everything everyone was writing down and saying? I guess it's kind of 90%, 95%, but I'm reminded of, sorry to draw on this, but a favourite Doctor Who story of mine

from the late 1980s, where a mad scientist set in the Second World War is cracking the Nazi ciphers. But he uses his computer machine, you can imagine what this is based on, to decipher some ancient runes, some Viking runes. At one point, he reads this out to the doctor and says, let the chains of Fenric shatter. And he sort of goes, oh, isn't this marvellous? You know, we can understand what it means. And the doctor just says, it can translate it, but who knows what it might mean. We are with Egyptian in the same position. In some cases, we can sort of understand what the words mean. So if you go into, stay a tomb in the Valley of

the Kings and read some of the inscriptions you were talking about earlier, we can see that it, you know, it might say something like, and so did the snake of Ish-Ra rise up from the pool of fire and did he, you know, blah, blah, blah. So in those sorts of situations, we can read the words, what does that mean? You know, we've got none of the thinking that goes behind that. That remains completely impenetrable. so we can't yet get into the mindset of the egyptians a hundred percent so i think if we did go back we'd seem a bit idiotic i think you know we'd get an awful lot of stuff wrong well you seem like an absolute genius in the present bud so don't go back thank you very much yeah i don't ever go back i look much cleverer

thank you for coming back on the podcast uh what is your latest book dude well my latest one still is is egyptologist notebooks but i'm i'm working on a new one i'm not sure i'm supposed to say this but it's called dynasties nice dynasties that will be coming soon put me in the diary for about 25 years time yeah definitely great to see you, buddy. Thank you very much. Likewise. Thanks, Dan.