Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rosetta Stone

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

The ancient Egyptian civilization was one of the oldest civilizations that we know of on Earth. While there is much we know about them, knowledge of their system of writing, known as hieroglyphics had become lost by the middle ages. Where there were different theories as to what the writing meant, no one was really sure how to read hieroglyphics. All of this changed in 1799 when French troops under Napoleon Bonaparte discovered a stone that unlocked the secrets of the language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ancient Egyptian civilization was one of the oldest civilizations that we know of on earth. While there's much we know about them, knowledge of their system of writing known as hieroglyphics had been lost by the Middle Ages. While there were different theories as to what the writing meant, no one was really sure how to read hieroglyphics. All of this changed in 799, when French troops under Napoleon Bonaparte discovered a stone that unlocked the secrets of the language. Learn more about the Rosetta Stone and how it decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics on this episode

of everything everywhere daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming.

What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This episode is sponsored by Audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson. In this landmark work, one of the world's most renowned Egyptologists tells the epic story of this great civilization, from its birth as the first nation state to its final absorption into the Roman Empire. Award-winning scholar Toby Wilkinson captures not only the lavish pomp and artistic grandeur

of this land of pyramids and pharaohs, but for the first time reveals the content of the constant propaganda and repression that were its foundations. You can get a free one-month trial to audible and two free audiobooks by going to audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking on the link in the show notes. Egyptian hieroglyphics were the writing system used by the ancient Egyptians, or, to be more accurate, it was the writing system used by Egyptian priests and scribes. The vast majority of Egyptians were illiterate, and writing was reserved only for a select view in Egyptian society.

If you've seen hieroglyphics, it's very different from systems of writing that might be used today. It makes heavy use of symbols like birds and snakes. If anything, it looks like a text message using a lot of emojis. There are over a thousand different hieroglyphic characters

that have been identified so far. Hieroglyphics can be found all over ancient Egypt on tombs and temples. The writing system is believed to have its roots as far back as 4,000 BC, and the first full hieroglyphic sentence that has been found dates back to around 2,800 BC. This makes hieroglyphics one of the oldest human writing systems, on a par with ancient

Samarian. Over time, another system of writing developed in Egypt, around 4 to 600 BC, a new system developed that was in more common use called Demotic. This system of writing looked very different than hieroglyphics. In fact, at first glance, it might look like a proto-Arabic writing system. Hieroglyphics were still used by priest, but Demotic, which had far fewer characters, became the system used in commerce and daily life. Demotic and hieroglyphics were different writing systems for the exact same language. Over time, things in Egypt changed. They were conquered by Alexander

the Great, and a Greek dynasty called the Ptolemies controlled the country. Then after a while, the whole Mark Anthony and Cleopatra thing happened, and Egypt just became another Roman province. And finally, in the first and second centuries, Christianity started to rise in popularity. In 391, Roman Emperor Theodosius closed all the pagan temples, and the last known use of hieroglyphics was written at the Philei Temple in the year 394. Only about 50 years later, the last known use of Demotic was found, also at the Philei Temple in 452. After this, Coptic and later Arabic became the dominant writing systems in Egypt. Fast forward several centuries, and the knowledge of how to read both Demotic and hieroglyphics had been completely lost. Attempts to decipher and rediscover the secrets to reading hieroglyphics

began in the 9th and 10 centuries. The first scholars to attempt to relearn hieroglyphics were Islamic scholars. Doolnan Ermercy and Ibn Washaya were the first two people to try to resurrect the language, but they failed. In fact, for centuries, everyone who took a stab at trying to decipher hieroglyphics failed. And here I should note that linguists have roughly broken all writing systems down to roughly three types. The first system uses phonograms. This is where characters represent sounds.

Most of the world uses such systems today. This would include the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hangul, and Devonogary. The next system uses logograms. This is where a character represents an entire word. The best example of this would be Chinese, which has about 50,000 different characters in total, and 2,000 to 3,000 in common use. The final system uses ideograms. This is where a symbol represents an idea. emojis are an example of this.

There are ancient writing systems in China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, where a fish, for example, is represented by an image of a fish. Today, the Chinese character for fish doesn't look anything like a fish. It's just a symbol that means fish. I mentioned this, because when the first attempts were made to decipher hieroglyphics, the assumption was that the symbols were not replicating sounds, that the symbols were either logograms or ideograms. And this approach got them nowhere.

In the 17th century, a German Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher believed that maybe hieroglyphics did represent sound. He was an expert in the Coptic language and felt that maybe Coptic was a direct descendant of hieroglyphics. It was a novel, and as we'll see, important approach to the study of hieroglyphics, but it too didn't lead anywhere. The problem was there didn't exist a single sample of hieroglyphics that was used with another language. If such a sample could be found, then it would be possible to finally be able to finally, figure out how the language worked. That moment, and the entire point of this episode, finally came in 1799. During Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt, a young French officer named Pierre Francois Bouchard was assigned to rebuilding an old Mameluke fort in the port city of Rosetta,

known today as Rashid. In the process of shoring up the fortification, he found a black stone with three different systems of writing on it. He didn't know what it was, but he was quite sure he had found something very important. The stone was part of a larger stelae which had been broken off, and the stone had been used by the Mamelukes for the construction of the fort. He sent it up the chain of command where the stone eventually was in the hands of Napoleon himself. It was given to the French Egyptologists who were part of the expedition, who quickly spread word of the discovery to other scholars in Europe. Rubbings and plaster casts of the stone were made, and within a relatively short period of time, they were in the hands of Egyptologists

throughout Europe. The stone itself remained in Egypt as Napoleon and his troops were stuck there. In 1801, when the British defeated the French forces in Alexandria, the capitulation of Alexandria explicitly gave all of the antiques the French had captured to the British, and this included the Rosetta Stone. In 1802, it was placed in the British Museum, and it has been there ever since. It is the most visited object in the museum. However, the story of the Rosetta Stone is not about a stone that sits in a museum. It's about deciphering an ancient system of writing. The three languages on the Rosetta Stone are Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphic. The Greek was translated relatively quickly. In 1803, Hubert Pascal and Milion published a paper in both Latin and French, which gave the

translation. Cambridge professor Richard Porson created an extrapolation of the Greek which was missing from the lower right corner of the stone, which had broken off. It turns out that the stone was written during the reign of Ptolemy V in 196 BC. a year after he was coronated as a 13-year-old. It was written by priests, and it was a listing of all the benefits bestowed upon the people by their king. Basically, it was an ancient form of propaganda. Once the Greek had been translated, that was the starting point for figuring out the rest of the stone. A Swedish scholar named Johann David Okrabad had been studying what he called cursive-comptic,

what is now called demonic. He realized that this was the middle language on the stone. He and French researcher Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sassie said about trying to decipher the demotic by comparing the Greek names used in the Greek text. By comparing the words for Alexandria and Ptolemy, they were able to make massive headway in figuring out demotic. Deciphering the hieroglyphs, however, took much longer. One of the biggest obstacles was that the assumption about hieroglyphics being symbols representing words wasn't exactly right.

One of the first breakthroughs was made by English polymath Thomas Young. He suggested that the cartusias, that being the parts of the hieroglyphic text surrounded by an oval, were a proper name and might be spelled phonetically. This could be compared to the name in Greek, and that might get you somewhere. It was a huge breakthrough. With this, they were able to figure out more about the Demotic text as well, and realized Demotic wasn't entirely phonetic, but also used ideograms that came from hieroglyphics. From this, they were able to figure out the names on other cartouches in other temples around

Egypt. The real breakthrough occurred with Jean-François Champolion. His work from 1822 to 1824 figured out the secret to hieroglyphics. It wasn't a system of logograms, nor was it a phonetic system. It was both. It was a combination of characters representing sounds and characters representing words. The closest thing I could use to describe it would be if you interspersed emojis into a text message. If you ask someone, do you want to get a pizza or a hamburger, and used emojis for pizza and hamburger, that would kind of sort of be representing what hieroglyphics are like. In hieroglyphics, there's a short vertical line next to characters that are logograms,

and they are mostly used for common nouns. As Champollion himself explained it in 1822, quote, It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, in the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word, unquote. Basically, it was far more complicated than anyone ever imagined. Nonetheless, the riddle of hieroglyphics was finally figured out, and it was all due to one French army officer who found a stone while repairing a fort. Without it, we'd probably still be in the dark today about hieroglyphics.

As for the stone itself, it's still in London. The Egyptians have asked for it back to put on display at their brand-new Grand Egyptian Museum, which is opening up in Giza in 2021. So far, the British have refused to return the stone, and many other artifacts taken from many other countries, under the international law doctrine of finders keepers, losers, weepers. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle. The associate producer is Thor Thompson. Remember to leave a five-star review to get your review read on the show. They can be left at Apple Podcasts, Podcast, Podcast Republic, or wherever you listen to the show.

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