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THE AMAZING STONE KEY

Last Updated 02 February 2012, 14:43 IST

A 700-kilo black stone, with lines of tiny writing, unlocked the secrets of one of the world’s most fascinating civilisations. Hail the controversial Rosetta Stone!

Among the vast and spectacular collections of the British Museum in London is a large chunk of black stone with lines of tiny, scribbly writing all over its surface. This rather drab and decidedly unglamorous artefact is the most visited exhibit in the entire museum! It’s called the Rosetta Stone and it is the key that unlocked the secrets of one of the world’s most fascinating civilisations – that of ancient Egypt.  Weighing in at over seven hundred kilos, it’s not exactly the kind of key you could put in your pocket and walk away!

Why so special?

For centuries, scholars and explorers had visited Egypt to gape in awe at her rich treasures—pyramids, temples, libraries full of papyrus manuscripts and burial chambers full of gold.They agreed that it all belonged to a great, ancient civilisation. But how great and how ancient they couldn’t tell because all the records from those times were painted or inscribed in hieroglyphics, a language that had been extinct since the 4th century CE. So the messages from the past just stayed there, tantalising everyone with their secrets. Then in 1799, the Rosetta Stone was discovered. 
                
The Stone had obviously been part of a large stone slab or stele, used to write out official decrees or messages. The scribbly writing on its polished surface turned out to be an inscription from 196 BCE, celebrating the reign of the 13-year-old Pharaoh, Ptolemy V. But what was more exciting than the message itself was the fact that it had been repeated three times, in three different scripts – Egyptian hieroglyphics, a sacred language used only by priests and kings, Demotic, a simple script for everyday use, and Ancient Greek, a script used for official information at this time.

Now, Ancient Greek was a known script. Demotic was a little more difficult but not unknown. Scholars realised that if they could translate those two sections and then match words from different sections of the stone, hieroglyphics could be deciphered. This could finally give them access to the records of ancient Egypt. You can imagine the excitement among the academics!

And that should have been the happy end of the tale of the Rosetta Stone. Except, it wasn’t.

Almost from the day it was discovered, the Stone was at the centre of a storm of international rivalry, conspiracies and bickering. In fact, the hullabaloo has followed the poor Rosetta Stone into the 21st century.

It all began in 1798

Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt as part of his grand plan to defeat his arch-enemy – Britain. He wanted to conquer Egypt first and eventually all Britain’s eastern colonies, including India. Napoleon took along with him a team of scholars, scientists, engineers and artists to set up an institute in Egypt. These intellectuals were to study the country in detail while his soldiers went about conquering the place.

A year later, while rebuilding a fort in the northern town of Rosetta,a French soldier spotted an unusual-looking polished stone in the rubble. He pulled it out and sent it off to the experts at the institute. The stone was immediately recognised as being of great importance and was presented to Napoleon himself for viewing. It was called the Rosetta Stone, after the town where it was discovered. Copies of the inscriptions were made and sent to European scholars to study.

Just in the nick of time! For who should then turn up but the British? They defeated the French forces and demanded that as part of the peace treaty, the French hand over all the antiquities, artefacts, notes and even biological specimens that they had collected in Egypt!

The leader of the French forces, Gen Menou, had grown rather attached to the precious Rosetta Stone.  He even carried it with him into battle and back again when the French army retreated to Alexandria. There he was forced to sign a Treaty of Capitulation, where all artefacts were to be surrendered. Menou was determined not to let go of the Stone. He claimed it as his private property and hid it. Eventually, Menou was betrayed when a French officer led some British scholars down a dark alley behind his residence in Alexandria where it was discovered, hidden under a pile of carpets!

The Stone was taken to England under armed escort. As soon as it landed there, it was presented to King George III and moved to the British Museum, where it has remained since 1802.

That was not the end of the Anglo-French rivalry over the Rosetta Stone. Now the competition was to see who could translate the inscriptions and crack the hieroglyphic code first. British scholar Thomas Young and a Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champollion were the main contenders. Young made the first breakthrough in the hieroglyphic section in 1814, when he recognised that royal names always had an oval ring or cartouche drawn around them. For example, the name Ptolemy would be enclosed by a cartouche. But Young could not progress much further because he was treating hieroglyphs as pictograms i.e. pictures that represent words.

His French rival, Champollion, was a linguistic expert who knew more than a dozen ancient languages. He was a child prodigy who had decided at age eleven to be the first to decipher hieroglyphs. After much work, Champollion came to a crucial conclusion: hieroglyphs were not pictograms. They were also based on sounds or phonetics! So almost 1400 years after it had died as a language, hieroglyphs could finally be read again.

Soon accusations began to fly thick and fast between British and French scholars. Each claimed that their countryman deserved the credit for deciphering hieroglyphics. Even as late as 1972, when the Rosetta Stone was taken to France for an exhibition, each side complained that the portrait of ‘their’ man was smaller than the other. (Both were of the same size!)

Meanwhile, the translation of the Rosetta Stone enabled scholars to start translating lines upon lines of hieroglyphs, slowly revealing the mysteries of ancient Egypt. The subject of Egyptology was born. Writers, artists, poets and tourists began to flock to Egypt, wanting to witness her ancient grandeur. Today, while the Rosetta Stone sits quietly minding its own business in the British Museum, another storm is brewing around it. Egypt has asked for the Stone on loan for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in 2013. British authorities haven’t agreed to the request as of now.

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(Published 02 February 2012, 14:43 IST)

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