In Our Time - The Rosetta Stone

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most famous museum objects in the world, shown in the image above in replica, and dating from around 196 BC. It is a damaged, dark granite block on which you can faintly see three scripts engraved: Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle and Hieroglyphs at the top. Napoleon’s soldiers found it in a Mamluk fort at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast, and soon realised the Greek words could be used to unlock the hieroglyphs. It was another 20 years before Champollion deciphered them, becoming the first to understand the hieroglyphs since they fell out of use 1500 years before and so opening up the written culture of ancient Egypt to the modern age.With Penelope Wilson Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Durham UniversityCampbell Price Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester MuseumAndRichard Bruce Parkinson Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, the Rosetta Stone may be the most famous museum object in the world, though perhaps not the most imposing. It's a damaged, dark, granite block about the height of a child starting school,

and on it you can faintly see three texts engraved in Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphs. Napoleon's soldiers founded in an Egyptian fort and realized that Greek words could help unlock the hieroglyphs, then still a mystery, and so it proved, revealing to us three millennia of Egyptian culture. With me to discuss the Rosetta Stone are Penelope Wilson, Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Durham University, Campbell Price, creator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, and Richard Bruce Parkinson, Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of the Queen's College University of Oxford. Richard Parkinson, you were once a curator of the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. Can you tell us more about it rather more than I did? Well, as you said, it's a pretty

large lump of stone. It's over a metre tall. It's about 76 centimetres wide and it's about 30 centimetres deep. So it's very substantial. And what we've got is the original base and the original sides, but the top is broken away. And the back is very roughly carved. It would almost certainly have been put up against a wall. And on the front, there are these three bands of text with the Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top, the cursive demotic in the middle, and then the Greek right at the bottom. And now it's a pale grey with a pink streak running through it. If you look at old publications, you'll see it's described as black basalt because it used to be black due to a layer protective wax that was put over it. But we cleaned that off

in about 1999. We've talked about the three languages as it were. We're coming to that. That's the meat of the programme. Hieroglyph, Demotic and Greek. A lot of people won't know what you mean by Demotic. It's a very cursive form of the Egyptian script. It actually derives from hieroglyphs, but it looks rather like Arabic or a little bit like shorthand. It's a pen-written form of the script that becomes so cursive you can't recognize the hieroglyphic signs. And that's a language and a script used for everyday purposes at the period of the stone's inscription. And why in Egypt does Greek have such a prominent place, such a prominent place, one of three? By this period, the Ptolemaic dynasty is of Macedonian descent, and they're essentially a Greek-speaking culture who are ruling Egypt.

And so the power balance is a bit tense between the Greek-speaking court and the Egyptian population and the traditional Egyptian temples. and the Rosetta Stone's use of different languages is because it's all about negotiating the power balance between these sort of competing spheres in a pretty multicultural society. How did it come to be in the British Museum? It was first found by Napoleon's troops in Egypt in 1799. And when Napoleon was defeated,

the Rosetta Stone was taken along with some other antiquities and it was given by George III to the British Museum. And you can see this and the labels painted on the side of the stone, which still read today captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801. Thank you very much. Penny Wilson, it was found in Rosetta. That is called now Al-Rashid. Where do you think it originated and was carved before it was set up?

It's likely that the Rosetta Stone in its original form when it would have been complete, a large Stela or Slav with this inscription on, was probably set up in a temple. Can you tell us about Steele before we go on? Yeah, sure. So Steele is a word that we use in Egyptian and some other cultures to describe a large slab of stone with an inscription or a scene carved on it. But they're very common in Egypt, and they're commonly used for funerary texts, but also for temple decrees and temple inscriptions.

So this dealer was probably set up, according to the inscription, in fact, in one of the first, second and third ranking temples in Egypt. And because of the nature of the stone, which is this very hard granitoid material, it's a very special stone, probably originally from somewhere like Aswan, where it may have been brought by royal permission, and then certainly to a workshop that was capable of carving this very hard stone in these very tiny signs and letters. So the most likely place where it was set up is an important site called Sias. And this site of Sias is just down the Rashid or Rosetta branch of the Nile south of modern El Rashid. And Sias nowadays is very denuded. It's been all of its temples and its buildings have been mostly removed in antiquity.

and the stones from Sires seem to have been taken by river all the way up to and down the river. So the river acting as a kind of conduit for dispersing the material. So with the stones eventually from the site being dispersed, taken down the river, and they ended up in lots of towns and villages all the way along the western side of the delta. So it's likely that this material that was then used to build the fort in Rashid had originated somewhere like Cyrus just down the river. And in the fort today, you can still see blocks built into the fort structure, which resemble blocks, as I say, found in other places to the south

and at Salhargat, Sias itself. So there seems to be the likelihood is that it actually came from Siam. in origin, and it's one of these dispersed bits of stone that found its way into the foundations of the fort at Rashid. When the stone was put up, what did it say? So when the stone was originally put up in the temple, it was a decree from the king, establishing his endowments to the temple and to the priesthoods in Egypt. So it was making clear what the bargain was that the king was striking between himself,

the ruling authorities and the temple priesthood. Now, originally, the decree was actually promulgated in Memphis, which was the very ancient capital city of Egypt, just at the apex of the delta near modern Cairo. And it was decided that a copy of this decree would be put in these other important temples. So what was probably set up at size was a copy of the decree to inform all of the priesthood about the good things that the king had done, about the bargain that had been struck between the kings and the priesthood.

Thank you very much. Can I come to you now, Campbell? Part of it was to extol the virtues of the 13-year-old new ruler, the new man in a throne. Can you tell us a little bit about him and what they were doing by extolling him so much? It's really about a bargaining statement, a negotiation between the king,

who traditionally makes, acclamations and the priesthood and the priesthood of the temple that's mentioned several times in the inscriptions has a vested interest in getting tax breaks. So Ptolemy the 5th is one of these kings, as Richard said, the last great dynasty, the final dynasty of pharaohs before the Roman emperors come along, beginning as the successors of Alexander the Great in the 300s BCE, and then ending with Cleopatra the seventh of famous Queen Cleopatra. And then Egypt becomes a province of Rome. They tend to reside in Alexandria, looking out towards the Mediterranean.

How firm was the grip of the Ptolemies at that time on Egypt? The Ptolemy's, the rulers, are culturally Greek. And the Egyptian priesthood, which is an increasingly small group, a rarefied group in society, are culturally Egyptian. the two have to kind of negotiate. So I think the priesthood depend on the patronage of the king, but the king equally, the pharaoh equally, depends on the support of the priesthood.

So any grip, although they kind of co-opt existing power structures when the Ptolemies came into Egypt, they're not, I hesitate to say, ethnically Egyptian. They want to appear Egyptian. That's why they appear in two-dimensional, three-dimensional art, wearing the regalia, the full kind of paraphernalia of Egyptian kingship. But there's this oddness, there's this, I guess, a kind of a sexiness. They're maybe slightly more voluptuous.

And so there needs to be a meeting, a coming together between the very powerful priesthood who own lots of land and are these bastions of Egyptian culture and the king of Egypt, the pharaoh. Can we turn now, Richard, Richard Parkinson, to the hieroglyphs, which have been baffling people and hypnotising people for many centuries? But what was the understanding of hieroglyphs at that time just before the Rosetta Stone Roll interview? Really, understanding was pretty limited. Hieroglyphs were last used around 390 AD and all knowledge of how they were. how they were read, had been lost, and Europe had access to very few Egyptian monuments,

and in particular it was dependent on the accounts of Greek and Roman visitors to Egypt. And the basic problem was that Egyptian hieroglyphs are signs that are based on pictures. And to the classical authors, they understood the pictures as being symbols of concept. And that's partly true of the Egyptian script, and the Egyptian priests at the time the classical authors were visiting were certainly playing up that aspect of the script. But throughout the Renaissance, you had repeated attempts to decipher the hieroglyphic inscriptions that were known to Europe, assuming they were in some sense symbolic. And this produced extremely fanciful interpretations of straightforward. forward names, I mean, quite ridiculous, allegorical interpretations. And people were exploring all sorts of means of trying to decipher, including trying to link the script with Chinese to see if that offered a parallel. So it was known from the classical authors that the Egyptian script contained great, mysterious pearls of wisdom from the Egyptian philosophers. And people had

hugely high expectations. And all attempts to decipher, to get a grip on the script, I think had really failed. Absolutely failed. The West knew quite a lot about Egypt from the objects. People had gone there and said, what magnificent things, these pyramids are, and these sphinxes and so on. But it was a silent, 3,000 years of silence, really. It was, people were so baffled by them.

Sometimes Renaissance scholars were trying to decipher hierogly inscriptions, which weren't even Egyptian and weren't even hieroglyphic. And I think it's meant by emphasizing the symbolic aspect, people were very blind to what actually was the reality, which is the hieroglyphic script system, is a mixture of picture signs, recording ideas, categories of words, and also sound signs. Penny Wilson, can we just go back to the idea of how widespread these were? So when it was found in this fortress, was this a eureka? moment, or was this oh, we've seen these things before? No, it seems to have been a eureka moment.

I think when the first engineers found the stone, they realised that there were three scripts on here, and there's chances were that the text was the same text, but in three different scripts and languages. They knew straight away that it was something important. And at that stage, there wasn't anything else comparable, and they kept it safe, and straightaway copies were made by taking ink prints of the steeler fragment.

And these were sent to scholars, particularly those who'd been in some way associated with the Napoleonic campaign and the gathering of information from Egypt. So they had this, but all those notes, they're still, the hieroglyphs are still a blank wall to them. Yes, indeed. There's still a bit of work to be done before they could to begin to put the pieces together. But it didn't just depend on the Rosetta Stone. There were other bilingual texts that were recognised as possibly also being important, such as the Kingston Lacey Obelisk, for example.

So scholars were actually sharing data and they were in contact exchanging some of their ideas. And this sometimes seems to have been a very fruitful and generous exchange. And at other times it got a little bit acrimonious. But I think initially, because there was such an interesting, interest in trying to crack the hieroglyphic code. People cooperated in the kind of information they had and the kind of text they had and people were gathering together all of these different bits of information to try to see what the best way it was of putting them together in order to understand the pictures on the hieroglyphic text and what they meant. Would it be fair to say

that it concentrated people's minds on the hieroglyphs? This was the thing that had to be, these had to be deciphered. So did that increase? its status when it came into the European sphere? It's possible that it did. But I think the status of the stone as a kind of key to unlock this civilization, I think that certainly gave it some cachet and gave it extra value in a sense, in that sort of sense. But I think as well, it's useful to point out that the demotic script on the stone

was also a target of investigation. to be cracked as well. It doesn't often get as much publicity, perhaps, as the hieroglyphic text. But in fact, the demotic was being worked on just as much. And people like Champollon, for example, they were also keen to understand how that script and text and language could be read. Thank you. Campbell Price, can we develop this a bit?

I mean, on how many levels was this important? Did word get around that there was this thing that might be the key to Egypt that might answer all the questions and so on. Did you become an arms race for knowledge, as it were, between England and France? In the last few years, it's increasingly becoming clear that you can't separate the finding and the interpretation of the Rosetta Stone from the geopolitical context. Egypt itself had enormous importance because it was, you know, it facilitated access to South Asia.

and before the later 19th century, when the Suez Canal was built, you know, you had to go overland in Egypt to get onto the Red Sea to get to imperial possessions, European imperial possessions in South Asia. So there was this real race, yes, a real arms race, to gain control of ground by European powers. But then, of course, Egypt had been known intellectually from, as Richard's already said, from classical sources, from the Bible. It's, of course, features prominently in the Bible.

And so getting to know ancient Egypt went in hand in hand, as Penny said, with getting to know, getting to quantify what was in Egypt itself, the flora, the fauna, the strength of a man in Egypt. So this is what Napoleon's savants, these scholars he took with them, were recording. Was there a buzz of excitement around the scholarly communities in Europe? Did it widely, did its presence and its possible influence and importance spread? There's an almost immediate recognition that this is a text, possibly the same text, in different scripts. So it's moved initially to the French Institute and Cairo and copies are made.

And so it's funny, it's kind of an echo of what is described in the text itself of this official problem. proclamation being copied and promulgated all over the country. The same is happening again in more modern times. But fundamentally, the Rosetta Stone, the text itself is in some ways rather dull, but it is of absolutely central importance to Egyptology and its conception of itself. Often you still see Egyptology, by which we mean Western Egyptology, pursued in mainly in Europe, being invented or being born with the decipherment of hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone. So let's get to the hieroglyphs which fascinated people and baffled people completely.

Richard Parkinson, how and when did scholars set about deciphering the hieroglyphs? What the Rosetta Stone allowed was for scholars to isolate some royal names. the name of Ptolemy is carved on the stone in a circular ring as a standard for Egyptian royal names and people guessed that the ring must contain the king's name. From the Greek text, they knew the name was Ptolemy and that allowed scholars such as Thomas Young to work out a set of alphabetic signs, hieroglyphs that actually recorded the sounds of the name Ptolemy and Champoleon... How did you, that sounds brilliant, but buffling, actually. I'm not the way you've said it.

You've been very clear, but can you just say it again somehow so that I can understand it? There's a wing on the stone that contains the name that must be Ptolemy, and you've got sort of about 10 hieroglyphs, and you can match, you know, the first hieroglyph up, hieroglyph up with a P, the next with the T, and work through the name that way. And then you can take the alphabet you've deduced, and it is like code breaking at this stage, and apply that to other names in other inscriptions. And on another inscription, you have the name Cleopatra, which we know from Greek, so you can work that out.

And it really should have led quite straightforwardly to decipherment. But, of course, people weren't expecting Egyptian hieroglyphs to write. the sounds of names. They thought they were symbolic pictures. And so Thomas Yan, when he produced this hieroglyphic alphabet, said, well, it's only being used for these names because they're foreign kings. They're not Egyptian kings. And the major breakthrough that Champolian and only Champolian made was to realize that the principle of hieroglyph's writing sounds was also used of traditional Egyptian names. And if the same sound principle was used for Egyptian kings, it could have been used for the Egyptian language as a whole. Now, Champolian, because he had

been obsessed with decipherment of hieroglyphs, had learned Coptic, which is the language of Christian Egypt and the direct descendant of ancient Egyptian. And so in a way he knew the language of ancient Egypt, he had Thomas Young's alphabet, and the realization that perhaps hieroglyphs could record the sounds of the Egyptian language, not just of foreign names, is said to have been made on the 14th of September in 1822 when he had a sudden revelation that you could read the Egyptian name Ramses on a copy of an inscription from Abu Symbol. And the mythology has it that he rushed through the streets of Paris to see his brother cried out, I've done it and collapsed in a dead faint for a couple of days, which is hopelessly exaggerated, one assumes.

I believe every word of it. Yeah, but I mean, he did, he really did do what Thomas Young had been on the verge of doing, but just couldn't, couldn't manage it because he was blinded by this classical account that the Egyptian script was a symbolic affair. Champolian sort of had a real enlightenment attitude. and tested everything. But what Champolio did was to tug away a curtain that had covered inscriptions and words.

It was extraordinary. I mean, I know a lot of people had helped him and had been there before him, but that was his final unique achievement. Am I right, Penny Wilson? Yes, I mean, in a sense, it was this realisation because that certainly opened the doors. But I think Champolion went on from there

to try to. to work out what the texts were actually saying. So he's interested in collecting inscriptions and examples. He worked at the Luf in the Egyptian galleries, for example, as the curator. He made visits to Egypt to collect more material. He was very pleased to get down to Abu Symbol, I think, to see that Ramsey's inscription that Richard's described, to understand the context and see where it had come from.

And I think because of his fascination with Egypt, he was able to understand the contribution that he'd made, but also then to begin to build on it as well. And in addition, he had students, people like Richard Lipsius, for example, who also mounted an expedition to Egypt after the death of Champolion in order to collect information about the sites

and about objects there too. So there was a kind of, it introduced a period of activity in gathering as much material as possible to begin to look at the texts and particularly with things like king lists once king's names were understood or could be read

the history of Egypt could begin to be pieced together and I think once Champaulian had made his discovery this spurred people on to begin to revisit the material they had in collections and museums but also to gather much more information but he prepared himself for a long down

as we understand it when he was 16, he gave a public lecture on philology, on the demotic in Egyptian. And at the time he was learning Coptic and Arabic. So he was deep in there from the beginning of his intellectual life. Yes, I think so. He was certainly a prodigy, I think, as far as language is concerned, but also had a fascination for Egypt, I think. And the story is he was taught Coptic by Coptic priests. And at that lecture, it was one of the first to argue that Coptic was related to ancient Egyptian. Egyptian. So he was also encouraged by this by his older brother. So I think there

seemed to be no holding him back. Once he got the bug, he was encouraged and he made great strides. And then I think in addition to the work that he did, being in contact with the scholars working on it, I think that probably spurred him on so that he could see he was really making progress where other people perhaps weren't. Campbell, Campbell Price, there's another stone in Dorset. Can you tell us how that fits into the deciphering trail? There is, yeah. So this has already been mentioned, this obelisk at what is now

in the grounds of what is now national trust property at Kingston Lacey in Dorset. So that was brought back from Egypt by a chap called William Banks, a dilettante interested party, someone who went out as many wealthy young men did in the late 18th and early 19th century. And so in 1815 he encounters this obelisk in the grounds of the Temple of ISIS on the island of Phelai in the south of Egypt. And it has hieroglyphs on it, but it also on its plinth has a Greek text. And it was assumed latterly that this was the same text.

and could potentially hold the same potential as a key that ultimately the Rosetta Stone served. It didn't, it's not the same text in Greek. Again, typical for the Ptolemaic period. This one dates to Ptolemy the 8th, so a little later than the text on the Rosetta Stone. But it's also a tax exemption. It's about the negotiation of power between the king and the priesthood in these texts. examples. But what William Banks does, I mean, he has the thing taken away by Bilzoni, another figure in the mythology of Egyptology, the circus strong man, Italian circus strong man who goes out and takes commissions and moves big heavy things. So Bilzoni almost loses it in the Nile, but eventually the obelisk makes its way to England. And William Banks, realizes and suggests, although very kind of hesitantly,

that there is a connection between the Greek and the Egyptian, and he does himself believe that there's a connection between what Richard described, the name rings, these cartusias, naming Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and the text naming those historical figures in the Greek. So Richard Parkinson, this knowledge, the great cloudbursts, clouds opening, and sunshine, but then picking away, picking away, picking away. What impact did this growing understanding of hieroglyphs have on the worldwide interest in Egypt, which is already there?

But what happened to it after this over a time with persons, different persons, but you've all highlighted in all your notes, Champagnol. What impact did this have? It was an absolute transformation because suddenly within a decade or so, you could start reading ancient Egypt in its own terms. The culture had been silent for so long. We'd known second-hand accounts from classical authors, from the Bible, but suddenly the Egyptians could speak in their own words.

And Champolian was collecting papari, was beginning to read literary texts, and it really opened up the history, it opened up the culture, the theology, everything about Egypt. But I think the key thing is it gives us the voices of the ancient Egyptians. And of course, that isn't all you need to understand a culture. Archaeology, material objects on their own can tell us a huge amount. But what you get with hieroglyphs is the subjective voices, the feelings, the inner thoughts of the ancient Egyptians, really unmediated by any sort of,

any transmission through Europe, through the classics, through the Bible. we get so much closer suddenly to hearing what Egypt was. I think it's, I'm sure, it's your notes, Richard, where you say that when Champagne eventually went to Egypt, he's probably the first man to go through Egypt, being able to read all the inscriptions wherever he went. Absolutely. The French under Napoleon, of course,

had done an incredible survey, as Penny said, of all the temples, but nobody knew which were early temples, very late temples, which were Roman. Champolian, for the first time since antiquity, as he walked through the sites, could see which kings had erected which monuments. He could look at the lists of kings, the Egyptian historical records, and begin to match them up with the classical accounts. So it's absolutely transformative. And in his letters, he comments about how watching the animals in the fields of Egypt is just like what's seeing the hieroglyphic signs. and he really saw ancient Egypt as very much embedded in modern Egyptian landscape and its people. And it's very hard to imagine what it must have felt like to be that first person.

And he seems modesty doesn't seem to be a characteristic of Champolian, according to the English accounts. I think he knew absolutely the huge achievement that he'd made. And it's not surprised. I don't think anybody could possibly blame him. The English were a bit, might have been a few sour grapes going around the English mouths at that same. Thomas Young certainly got increasingly bitter. And when Young's letters were published after his death, his relatives described Champollion as the ingenious but unscrupulous Frenchman. So it really was, it was caught in international and personal. rivalry by that point. But nothing can take away, I think, Champolian's achievement. Penny Wilson, how did these texts, a growing study of texts, which could be read then after

Champonia and others, how did they sit alongside the archaeology? Yeah, when they found, when they deciphered the hieroglyphs and could read them, they suddenly realized that they actually needed to collect a few more objects and a few more examples of the inscriptions. So there was a bit of a hunt on to do surveys and expeditions to Egypt in order to collect material. So the material was copied in Egypt and published in Europe for scholars so that they could study the texts and begin to acquire more material. Now, whether these early expeditions would qualify fully as archaeology, because of course archaeology was still in its infancy.

I'm not so sure. But certainly what it did is it highlighted the number of sites and the number of archaeological sites in Egypt that there were. So there was a great deal of interest in acquiring more information. And gradually over time, the archaeology became perhaps better developed and sites were excavated in a more scientific way. But it was clear that the material from the world. the text was a wonderful supplement to the kind of evidence that was gained from archaeological

sources. So the tombs with their illustrations and their scenes and sometimes the objects in them were complemented by the texts on the walls which record the rituals recording ideas about the afterlife and funerary beliefs. For example, in temples, the texts contain the rituals and information about what went on in the temples apart from the architectural details. But in settlements where there was less inscriptional material. Here, the archaeology really held sway

was really the most important thing because it just wasn't the surviving material. Apart from some sites in the south of Egypt, where papyrus documents were preserved much better and here, rich archives of papyri, say from Lahoun in

Middle Egypt, these were able to show the stuff of everyday life alongside the living quarters and the lived experience of people in Egypt. So together, the two things give us a wonderful richness of information about Egypt.

Thank you very much. Campbell Price, is it possible to synthesise and to be that and elliptic about it? What major impact has the Rosetta Stone had on the understanding of ancient Egypt? Richard and Penny have summed up beautifully.

I think the impact on our understanding of what we think of as ancient Egypt. I mean, it's difficult to estimate the greater understanding of ancient Egyptian culture thanks to the insight of hieroglyphic and demotic text. But I think the slightly more sinister aspect to this

is that once that hieroglyphic code was cracked, it was very much a European discovery. And that has had, yeah, a significant. impact on the development of Egyptology that we in the West, the British and the French in particular, tends still, sadly, to think of a kind of intellectual hegemony of this knowledge about the past in Egypt to the detriment of our Egyptian colleagues. But fortunately, that's changing in the last few years especially. And so I think, you know, anyone can, can, can, find out about ancient Egypt, but it tends to be traditionally British and European scholars

who have really dominated the subject of what we call Egyptology, the study of pharaonic Egypt. Thank you. Richard, almost an appendage to that, Richard Parkinson, would it matter if the stone were restored to Egypt? Well, that's a very hard, hard question, of course. In a way, the Rosetta Stone has become this great icon of Egyptian culture, partly by accident, because the decipherment of hieroglyphs, which is so crucial for understanding ancient Egypt from Europe, it didn't only happen through the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was only one bit of evidence that trigger the decipherment. Now, the arguments for returning it to Egypt, it is quintessentially Egyptian, that is where it belongs. The one thing to be said for it being still in Europe is that its importance is to do with its horribly entangled colonialist history.

It was created in a multicultural society between competing factions in the Mediterranean. It was discovered when the French, the Ottoman Empire and the English were fighting it out in Egypt. And its importance is really because it came to Europe, because it was circulated amongst European scholars that allowed the European decipherment. If it hadn't come to Europe in that legal but possibly unethical manner, then it simply wouldn't be an important. inscription at all. The other priestly decrees, the Canopus decree in the Kari Museum, are better preserved, possibly even more interesting texts. The Rosetta Stone's importance and significance for the world and for modern Egypt really springs from the fact it moved to Europe. And so to return it back to Egypt, it goes against in some ways the regrettable factors that have made it such

a significant item. So of all the objects that could be sent back from, say, the British Museum, in a way, the Rosetta Stone is the one which has a really strong case for remaining in Europe, because that's part of the modern trajectory that gave its importance. And certainly it has acted as an ambassador to Europe for Egyptian culture. Penny Wilson, the stone was first installed in a temple at Sais. That's where you're working at the moment. Are you hoping to find the last third of it, the bit that's broken off? I would love to find the last pieces of it, but I think it must be like finding a black

ant on a dark stone in the dark of the night. So I'm not hopeful. But my Egyptian colleagues who are currently carrying out some excavations at Silas as well, they're actually working in some Ptolemaic levels. So I think we're keeping our eyes open. But as I explained, their site has been very denuded and scattered throughout the Western Delta. So it's probably more likely that if there are any fragments from the top part or the base, that they're supporting a mosque or underneath somebody's house somewhere up the Rosetta branch, I think.

Can you, we're coming to the end now. Campbell, Camperice, what impact has the Rosetta Stone had more widely on culture, on the culture of museums and so on? As you said initially, Melvin, it is probably the best known museum object in the world in some ways, and it's emblematic of much more than just ancient Egypt. So, you know, if you type Rosetta Stone into Google, the first thing you'll find is the language, learning software.

So it's become a kind of an icon of a key, a kind of a key into understanding other cultures, especially other languages. It features in international space exploration.

There's the Rosetta Space probe. And I was reminded recently that even in Harperley's To Kill a Mockingbird, there's a reference to the Rosetta Stone as a source of authority. there. So it has a really wide impact and as Richard describes the beautiful redisplay of the stone in 1999 I think really captures that general awe and wonder at museum objects just captured in

one piece and its impact is quite clear if you visit the Egyptian sculpture gallery at the British Museum. Well we have the last word to the once keeper of the Rosetta Stone. That's quite a, that's quite a job, isn't it? Isn't it, Richard? Do you have any feelings about it? And did you become fond of it at all or what? Oh, it's, it's bloody heavy. It's a real pain to move. But it stands on its original base perfectly. I think I find it hugely optimistic because it's not very attractive, it's battered, it's had a very troubled history, and yet somehow it captures the human imagination. People want to see it. They want to buy souvenirs of it because it somehow embodies the

idea that you can understand another culture. So I think it's a great icon, a great symbol of humanity's hope to try and understand other people. So it's had a bad history, but I think on the whole, it speaks well for the future of humanity. Well, thank you very much. And thanks to all of you. Thanks to Penny Wilson and to Campbell Price and Richard Puck. Parkinson, of course. Next week, it's medieval Christian pilgrimage. The urge to travel for the good of your soul. And for those who couldn't travel, there's always the pilgrimage of the mind. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I think the easiest way for me to start is to say, start with you, Penny. Is there anything that you would like to have said you didn't say?

when the stone was set up, it was a particularly nasty time in Ptolemaic period, actually. The royal family was at each other's throats. We've got quite a lot of murdering going on in Alexandria. And also the south of Egypt had been in revolt as well. So it was kind of a very important for the king to reestablish himself and his authority. And the stone probably represents quite a lot of investment on the part of the king. I wonder, just based on that, Penny, I wanted to ask you and Richard this. Do you think that, you know, we have so many more sources, classical sources for the bloodthirsty, incestuous nature of the Ptolemy's.

Do we not imagine, though, that previous Veronica times were just the same and we just don't have the sources for them? Oh, I'm sure, probably. Yes, yes, I think. Yeah, Richard, you do? Well, we've got the Harim conspiracy with Ramses III getting murdered. It's, yeah, I think we've just got better sources and more narrative accounts of the Ptolemies. They probably all were equally bad. I also like, sorry to go on, but I also like the fact that when the stone was cleaned,

it had this little pink bit on it. And I find that very intriguing and a wonderful thing that is an object that you think you know very well. everybody knows all about it. And then suddenly it's got something new to tell you just because somebody cleaned it. And that particular type of stone is really beautiful. And all of the postcards, the millions of postcards that were sold before saying it was black basalt were completely wrong. It wasn't basalt. And it wasn't black. I mean, it's really. But what was found when they were cleaning it, there was also traces of the ink in the stone, which, as you mentioned Penny was when they were taking prints of the stone. And of course, it's not certain

Champoli never saw the stone. We know he saw copies of it. It's not certain, Richard. It said he visited London once, but it's not proof of that on the English side has been very hard to find. And I think it's only mentioned in one of the later biographies. So it was really the copies of the stone that led help decipherment. And it, it, it, it, it was really, you know, it. It was, It is a great icon, but it is slightly overrated. I mean, it has this sort of idea that it's a granite enigma machine, which isn't really true. It's captured the imagination, but demotic or the other things

should get more attention, I think, in the great myth. And yet the hieroglyphus continue to fascinators, don't they? The unraveling of the hieroglyphus seems to be some sort of moment, and maybe not the great eureka moment, but something happened to people's view of things, which is massive literature, a massive change. They're just going to say that the stone, it might be a bit unfair that the stone is the only emblem

of that decipherment, but certainly the decipherment is a revelation about what it tells us about ancient Egypt. We can't overestimate that at all. It was huge. Did only be learned to read hieroglyphics? constantly teaching at the moment. If you're interested, I'm running an online evening class

through the Egypt Expiration Society. We have about 250 people signed up for that. And they've been very, very enthusiastic, Penny. I know about your classes for the Egypt Exploration Society. What does it sound like? Oh, that's another question. You didn't ask about pronunciation. That's another issue.

We have some ideas. And again, it's mostly based on Coptic, but I think it's true to say we're not exactly sure. There's an idea. If you watch The Mummy, there are people speaking ancient Egyptian in that. So that might give you an idea. Please don't. Go to it.

I like that the inscription has a reference. You know, it's kind of an auto reference to itself. It talks about the words of the gods, the Medu Nature, and then the words of documents, and then the language of the Greeks. That's a rather nice aspect to it. one of the British Museum's souvenirs from the stone was a chocolate Rosetta stone

and when that was designed we wrote the word for hieroglyphs in hieroglyphs at the top and then the word for demotic in demotic in the middle and the word for Greek in Greek at the bottom so it was simplified but I was really quite proud of that

it looked pretty good it was quite small Only one word in each thing. I never tasted it. I couldn't. Yeah. I was too proud of it to eat it, I think. Sure.

Well, thank you very, very much. I thought we're smashing. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm Zand Van Tullochin. And I'm Kimberly Wilson. And just before you go, we wanted to quickly tell you about our podcast made of stronger stuff from BBC Radio 4. I'm a psychologist and Zand is a medical doctor.

And we're bringing together our special. to take a tour of the human body. Each week we hone in on a specific body part from the eyes and lungs to the appendix or the vagus nerve and we ask how we can understand it better, ourselves more, and combine the body and mind to produce positive change. So subscribe to Made of Stronger Stuff on BBC Sounds.