The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick The surprising and compelling story of two rival geniuses in an all-out race to decode one of the world’s most famous documents—the Rosetta Stone—and their twenty-year-long battle to solve the mystery of ancient Egypt’s hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the world, attracting millions of visitors to the British museum ever year, and yet most people don’t really know what it is. Discovered in a pile of rubble in 1799, this slab of stone proved to be the key to unlocking a lost language that baffled scholars for centuries. Carved in ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone carried the same message in different languages—in Greek using Greek letters, and in Egyptian using picture-writing called hieroglyphs. Until its discovery, no one in the world knew how to read the hieroglyphs that covered every temple and text and statue in Egypt. Dominating the world for thirty centuries, ancient Egypt was the mightiest empire the world had ever known, yet everything about it—the pyramids, mummies, the Sphinx—was shrouded in mystery. Whoever was able to decipher the Rosetta Stone, and learn how to read hieroglyphs, would solve that mystery and fling open a door that had been locked for two thousand years. Two brilliant rivals set out to win that prize. One was English, the other French, at a time when England and France were enemies and the world’s two great superpowers. The Writing of the Gods chronicles this high-stakes intellectual race in which the winner would win glory for both himself and his nation. A riveting portrait of empires both ancient and modern, this is an unparalleled look at the culture and history of ancient Egypt and a fascinating, fast-paced story of human folly and discovery unlike any other.

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I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre order deal is to go to beacons of leadership.com. That's beacons of leadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book

from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. You want to order this book up. You can get it right now. It just came out on October 19th, 2021. The Writing of the Gods, The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick. He's going to be joining us today to talk about all the cool stuff that went into his book and study of it. He is or was the chief science writer at the Boston Globe. He's written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many others. And he's written acclaimed books on a wide range of subjects, including Art Forgery, Isaac Newton,

and the Scientific Revolution. His newest book is The Writing of the Gods, the one we just mentioned. And welcome to the show, Edward. Thanks for coming by. How are you? Oh, I'm doing pretty well. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. I'm running a podcast. How are you doing? No, I'm just kidding. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot coms or wherever you want people to go pick up this fine book. It's easiest to get Amazon or at your local bookstore. I've heard of that Amazon. To learn about me, I'm at EdwardDolnick.net.

Ah, there we go. EdwardDolnick.net. Go ahead and look them up, guys. So this book came out, and what motivated you to write this book? Well, The Rosetta Stone is about how you read hieroglyphics in Egypt. That was this giant mystery, and they solved it. And the solution to that deciphering mystery is the greatest coup in deciphering. There's been all kinds of enigma mysteries and wartime codes and things like that. Code-breaking stories are always great. And this was the biggest and the most important of them all. Egypt had been the most important country in the world for 30 centuries

in the ancient world. America's hoping to get to three centuries. And all that time, nobody knew what was going on there. Nobody could read what they'd written about themselves. And finally, it got figured out. And so this book is about how you did that decoding. It's quite a yarn. And it's one of the most famous objects in the world? Yeah, it is a super famous thing, although lots of people don't know what it is. It looks like a headstone in a graveyard. It's a big hunk of rock, about four feet tall.

And what caught the eye of the first people who found it in around 1800 was that it's got different kinds of writing on it. It's got hieroglyphs at the top, which were what people wanted to understand, but no one could read. And then it has some weird squiggles in the middle section. And then at the bottom, there's Greek, which people did know how to read. Yeah. And so what they saw right away when they saw this, why would you write three things on one stone, three different messages, unless it was the same message written three different ways. And so the Rosetta Stone was going to be the key, starting with Greek that you did know, to finally unlock this mystery that no one had been able to cope with for 2,000 years since Egypt fizzled out. Wow, that's pretty awesome. You write this book.

Give us an overarching of the book and what goes inside of it. The deal is Egypt had this astonishing history, as I say. And in Egypt, every temple, every monument, every obelisk is covered with these hieroglyphs, this writing. It's picture writing. It looks strange. It's drawings of birds and snakes and circles and triangles. And they put it up on everything. Ruled the world for 3,000 years, then disappeared.

Nobody knew what all that was about. Centuries go by. Egypt stays a mystery. And then in 1800, France and England, who were the two great superpowers at the time, are duking it out in Egypt. A soldier there stumbles across this giant stone, which today is called the Rosetta Stone. They notice this writing we talked about. They say, what's this? And immediately, scholars all around the world try figuring it out. And they think it's going to be easy. They think this will take about two weeks because here's one language

we don't know. Here's the Greek we do know. We'll match them up. They thought it would take two weeks, but it took 20 years. It involved a race between two rival geniuses, one of them French, one of them English, one of them English, each of them racing for glory and for their nation and for themselves, trying like mad to solve this mystery and just not able to do it. Wow. And the Egyptians lived for 3,000 years and then they just disappeared? Or not the Egyptians, but the... No, they ruled the world from about 3,000 BC to about zero, from the Great Pyramid to Cleopatra, say.

Then they're conquered. Other countries take over. Egypt fades away off the world stage. But that run they had of 30 centuries, that's astonishingly long time. Cleopatra came at the end of it, say. From the beginning of Egyptian history to Cleopatra, all that time, Egypt ruled the world. That was about the same as from Cleopatra to the Wright brothers. You know what ended the rule, don't you?

Facebook. Sorry, that was a long way to go to set that joke up. So that was pretty interesting. In fact, I was just reading about how Cleopatra worked with, I believe she worked with Rome and trying to get all of her family wiped out. Is that true? Yeah, the Cleopatra stories are quite over the top and amazing. At the end of Egypt's run, first the Greeks and then the Romans come into the story. And so it becomes this tangle of empire.

The reason that there was Greek on the Rosetta Stone, in fact, was that Alexander the Great, who was Greek, had come and conquered Egypt and installed one of his descendants, one of his generals as a pharaoh. So all of a sudden, Egypt, which had been independent, is now ruled by Greek, by Greece, pharaohs, generals. Yeah, she seemed nice. I had a friend who's like, we should have rulers like her. And then I was reading about her and I'm like, yeah, she doesn't seem like she's really that cool. She like gets the Romans to kill off all of her family and crap. And you're just like, we're impressing them. And you're just like we're impressing them and you're just like wow yeah this i thought my film had issues wow yeah there's there's no no levels of of over-the-top self-indulgence and power madness to compare with egypt you know the pyramid say which was built as a monument by the pharaohs. It's about 40 stories tall, the tallest of the pyramids.

And it's made of big stone blocks about chest high and as wide as you can spread your arms, thousands and thousands to build it. And this is just because the pharaoh says, I want this as a tribute to me. It took people working day and night, shoving those stones in place 20 years without let up. Wow. And I thought my job at Amazon was hard. Yeah,

you didn't want that. You didn't want to get a pea bucket to Amazon. No, I'm just kidding. Oh, the Amazon jokes. I'm going to lose the Amazon crowd, which we probably won't.

Anyway, they know what we're talking about. So you detail this 20-year run that these guys go on competing for the prize? Yeah, what happens is England and France are the great superpowers. They're fighting all over the world, including in Egypt. When they do fight in Egypt, this is Napoleon's army. So they start off great, the French do. And it's the French who find the Rosetta Stone, but the English end up conquering the French. The English say to France, the trophies you found here, we's the most popular exhibit at that museum. And it has been ever since they found it. It's the most visited. The gift shop has Rosetta Stone postcards and

mouse pads and school books and notepads and everything you can think of. It's like the Mona Lisa is in Paris. The Rosetta Stone is in London. I thought the most visited thing in museums in France was a white surrender flag, but I could be wrong. I don't know. Now we just lost the French crowd. I'm really running it today. This is really interesting because I always heard about it. I never really knew much about it.

And then I always heard about the Rosanna Stode software program for doing stuff. Do they use, what was the people need to buy the book and read if they really want to find out some of the tricks and tips, but anything you want to tease out maybe on how they were working to solve the mystery or solve the mystery or anything you want to tease readers with? If you think about it, it's actually, it's actually amazing that they were able to figure it out at all, even in 20 years. If you think of looking like at a Chinese restaurant, say, at the Chinese writing that's next to the English sometimes, and think of somebody said, OK, we'll take away the English. How are you going to how are you going to work that out? That would be really hard. And it would be especially hard if you didn't if you didn't know Chinese or didn't know anyone you could talk to who could explain it. And think how hard it would be not only if you didn't know Chinese, but if no one in the world knew it, if it was a dead language and had been dead for 2000 years.

So what these guys had to do was look at this, these hieroglyphs, the snakes and the owls and all that kind of writing. No one had been able to read it since about the year zero. They're trying to sort it out with no idea of how it sounds. And so it's an astonishingly complicated job to sort it out. What they did is look for words that they knew were in the Greek because they could read the Greek, like king and pharaoh and things like that. And they'd say, that pops up all the time. And let me find a string of symbols that pop up all the time in the hieroglyphs. Maybe those are these same important words like king or pharaoh. So that was the first thing they did.

They tried to make a guess. The Greek talks about the pharaoh at the time, whose name was Ptolemy, that talks about him over and over. So they say somewhere in these hieroglyphs, it must correspond to the name Ptolemy. And they make a guess about which are those. And then they have a start. Huh. So they were like looking for phrases, maybe combinations of words that were phrases.

Yeah. But it's harder than that, even because the hieroglyphs they're just one after the other a snake then a rock then a star you don't even know where the words start and stop imagine if you were if it was thousands of years in the future and nobody remembered about english anymore and nobody was even sure if there once had been a United States. We're almost there now. So imagine somebody in that future, archaeologists or something, finding this bit of rock with some marks on it that maybe they were letters. And even if you managed to sound them out, you wouldn't know what those corresponded

to. If English had died out and you sounded out even c-a-t, cat, how would you ever guess that those sounds pronounced together meant a little animal with whiskers? And it's a really hard problem. Let's see. You probably can't tell us how it turns out in the end. Someone wins, clearly. What's fun is that these two geniuses are knocking heads with each other. They're trying to be the first for their own glory, for national glory.

They're making progress along the way. Everybody knows that whoever solves this is going to be just enormous acclaim and fame. These rival geniuses who have nothing in common, in fact, they're almost opposites. The Englishman was an all-around genius and aloof and snooty and high-toned. The Frenchman only cared about Egypt, nothing else in the world. But he was brilliant too.

They're both terrific at languages. The Englishman is great at everything he turns his attention to. The Frenchman is great at this one issue of the ancient world they're knocking heads they're going at it and yeah in the end one of them wins nice 20 years that's a maddening amount of time to spend trying to decipher communication it took me that long to figure out what my girlfriend meant by the word fine and no you go out with your friends in fact

they still think we're i think the jury's still out on some of that. I don't know. But we need a Rosetta Stone for women. That might be good. But no, this is pretty cool. It's amazing how many people really like it and follow it there in the British museums. Anything else you want to tease out on the book and what people should know about it? The fun of the story, it's about how they did the deciphering. And what's neat, people always like decoding and deciphering stories, World War II and spies and things like that. But most of those stories are actually really hard. Like Enigma, that was the Nazis' code making machine in World War II. The Allies broke it. That was Alan Turing. And that helped win the war for the Allies, that success. But what he did, as important as it was, is really hard to understand. It's a mathematical thing. And it's terrific that he did it. And we might not be here if he hadn't. But just to understand exactly what he did is very difficult. But the hieroglyphs are pictures, and it's an accessible mystery.

And you really can understand what these guys do. And part of the fun of the book is you dive into this, and it's like Saul Crossword or a Sudoku or something. It's not impossibly difficult. It's really this clever mystery, and they make guesses, and they see things, and they race off, and then they crash into a wall because they guessed wrong, and they start over, and they get it right this time. So how do they know when they finally get it right? I think that you might be able to tell us. What sort of combo do they know? Like just it reads like proper text when they finally solve it? Well, it's like a cross text when they finally solve it? Or how do they know?

It's like a crossword puzzle. If you've guessed some answer in a crossword, I don't know, Chicago, if you think that's the answer going across to certain clues. And now you try some verticals and it lines up with those letters in Chicago, you can be pretty sure that you were on the right track. So what they did is try to,

they figure out that first name, Pharaoh, Ptolemy of a Pharaoh. And so they had a guess that a lion stands for the letter L and a snake stands for the letter B, that kind of thing. And then they found something else that they thought was about Cleopatra because of where they found it. And Cleopatra has a bunch of letters in common with Ptolemy. They both have a T and they both have an O and they both have an L. And so they said, if we were right in our first guess, which hieroglyphs corresponded to Ptolemy, then we should be able to test our theory on this new name Cleopatra that has a bunch of the same letters. And so they did.

The letters that overlapped, it fit, and then that let you fill in a few new letters. And with those new letters, you can move on to new words and try it like that. Yeah. It's kind of like crosswords. Yeah. It's code-breaking, basically. It is code-breaking. Great thing here on the screen from Lou Kerr.

Hello from Cincinnati, Ohio. Started reading this yesterday afternoon and recommending it to all my friends and love a good read. How's that for a great show? Well, there you go. Right there on the show. Thanks, Lou, for chiming in there. Yeah, good to see you. Yeah.

There you go. You've got the Lou endorsement. Once you've got the Lou endorsement, you're set for life. Probably a New York Times bestseller at this point. If it wasn't already, was it a New York Times bestseller? It's the number one bestseller in ancient Egyptian history. That's for darn sure.

Anything else you want to plug out on the book before we go, Edward? No, but the point of this book is that it's fun. It's a race. It's exciting. It's a mystery. This is as far as could be from homework. If you dive in, you'll be solving one of the great mysteries of the ages. There you go.

There you go. Now, if we can just get that whole figure out what women's communication are, that should be next. Anyway, I'm just doing jokes, people. So, Edward, thank you for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it. Thank you for being here. My pleasure. Thanks very much.

There you go. Give us your plugs so that people can find you on those interwebs. EdwardDolmick.net. There you go. And guys, order up the book wherever fine books are sold. Remember, stay out of those alleyways, those dark alleyways with those dark book guys that have little capes and they go,

you know, I don't buy a book. And you want to be careful. There's usually needles in those alleyways. You want to go to where fine books are sold and pick up The Writing of the Gods, The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone. October 19th just came out. 2021. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss.

You can see the free version of this broadcast. All the versions are free. I don't know why I said that. You can go to Goodreads.com, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever the kids are playing and doing all their crazy stuff online. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation.

It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold.

But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com.

So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold.