In The British Museum Hall 4 in the United Kingdom, there is a rectangular black basalt stone stele with fracture marks on the top, and the stele is engraved with dense text symbols, which looks solemn and mysterious.
This stone stele is the famous Rosetta Stone, which is a precious historical relic left over from the ancient Egyptian kingdom, which has a history of more than 2,000 years and is also one of the treasures of the British Museum.
The symbols inscribed on rosetta's stone are ancient Egyptian scripts that have long been lost, and how to decipher it has stumped countless archaeologists.
Finally, a French scholar who had devoted himself to Chinese characters, Shang Bolian, stood up, he was inspired by Chinese characters, and finally used the logic of "Chinese" to crack this text.
The deciphering of rosetta's stone inscription also laid the foundation for the study of ancient Egyptian language and culture, which gave birth to the historical discipline of ancient Egyptology.
Discovery of the Rosetta Stone
Although the Rosetta Stone is collected in the British Museum, it was first discovered by the French, and its excavation is inseparable from Napoleon, an important figure in French history.
In June 1798, when Napoleon was making his debut in Europe, he became commander-in-chief of the Italian Front of the French Republic, and after defeating the Austrian Empire in northern Italy, he rose to fame.
At a time when France was vying with Britain for colonial power in the Middle East, Napoleon was sent to the Middle East to curb British expansion.
Napoleon's expeditionary force first arrived in Egypt, captured the city of Alexandria, expelled the British forces, and soon basically occupied all the land territory of Egypt, and the progress was very smooth.
The young Napoleon was ambitious, in addition to hoping to seize greater power in the field of military politics, he also hoped to establish his reputation in the field of history and culture, and as a soldier, he also deliberately obtained the status of academician of the French National Academy for himself.
The destination of this expedition, Egypt, is a famous ancient civilization in history, Napoleon brought more than a hundred well-known scholars from France, and established the Egyptian Research Institute, hoping to knock on the door of Egyptian history and culture research.
The expedition was also a pleasant surprise, and in August 1799, Lieutenant Bouchard, an engineer officer under Napoleon, accidentally discovered a precious stone stele.
At that time, in order to defend against the British army, Napoleon's army was building fortifications near Rashid Castle on the delta on the western tributary of the Nile estuary.
Bouchard led the soldiers and men to demolish the houses on the ground and dig trenches along the battle line, and while he was busy, a subordinate reported to him that he had found a stone tablet engraved with incomprehensible symbols.
At this time, at the critical juncture of the war, the fate of this black basalt stone stele was likely to be the foundation of the French fortifications like ordinary stone slabs, but fortunately it met Bouchard, who knew a little about archaeology.
Bouchard knew that Egypt had a history of ancient civilizations, and the stele might have a great deal of potential, so he quickly reported it to his superiors, and eventually Napoleon ordered the stele to be transported to Cairo.
French historians and archaeologists in Cairo were immediately stunned by the stele.
Only to see that about a third of its top has been broken, leaving the part about 1.1 meters high, 75 centimeters wide, 28 centimeters thick, the inscription carved on it is divided into three parts, each of which is a different script, the lowest of which is the recognizable ancient Greek, and the upper two scripts are unknown at the time.
These inscriptions have been buried underground for many years and are still clearly visible after excavation, and the entire stone slab leaves hundreds of lines of text, and such a long complete inscription is extremely rare in archaeological discoveries.
Scholars immediately realized the great value of this stele, and two experts came from Paris, France, to copy the words on the stele with plaster and make it into rubbings for easy study.
According to the practice of archaeologists, it should have been named after Rashid where it was found, but ironically, French soldiers at the time mistranslated Rashed as Rosetta.
Since then, this stele has had the name Rosetta, which has been passed down to this day, and the original Rashid Castle has been renamed Rosetta.
Subsequently, the political situation in France underwent, And Napoleon, who was anxious to seize power, rushed back to France, and the British took advantage of the situation to defeat the French army remaining in Egypt and regain control of the situation in Egypt.
When driving the French army out of Egypt, the British, who had always liked to loot the historical relics of various countries, asked the French army to hand over all the cultural relics found in Egypt to the British.
The French, who knew the value of rosetta's stone, did not want to give it up, and secretly hid it on an evacuated ship, hoping to fool through the customs and transport the precious stone back to Paris.
The English, who had already heard the news, had long been staring at the French, and under close inspection, the French ships containing the Rosetta stone were intercepted at the last moment before setting sail.
The British found the stele and shipped it back to England as a trophy.
Since then, the Rosetta Stone has been preserved in the Egyptian exhibition hall of the British Museum and has been exhibited to this day.
The proud British also deliberately wrote on the label of the stone tablet "The spoils of the conquest of Egypt by the British army" on the display, showing off their victory in Egypt.
The inscription on the stone tablet that can never be deciphered
The Rosetta Stone eventually ended up in England, and the deciphering of the inscription on it had just begun.
According to the identification of archaeologists, the Rosetta Stone has a history of more than two thousand years, and which dynasty it belongs to and what kind of story it has behind it depends on the inscription on it to tell us.
The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is divided into three scripts, the top of which is an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph, because the top has been broken, leaving only 14 lines.
The complete inscription that remains in the middle is another script of ancient Egypt: the secular inscription, also known as Egyptian cursive, has a total of 32 lines; the bottom text is 54 lines of ancient Greek.
Of the three scripts, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and cursive scripts have long been lost, and historians at the time could not read the meanings, but fortunately, European scholars had mastered ancient Greek.
The complete ancient Greek text at the bottom tells the historical origin of the stone stele, which was originally carved in 196 BC.
Shortly after the young Ptolemaic V ascended the throne, the young Ptolemaic V was so generous to the Egyptian priesthood that he issued a series of decrees abolishing the taxes owed by the temple, allocating funds to rebuild the temple and giving away grain.
Naturally, this grace was embraced by the Egyptian priests, who in the spring of 196 B.C. gathered to celebrate the first anniversary of Ptolemy V's accession to the throne and inscribed the words of praise in his praise on stone tablets in three languages.
In the last sentence, it is also specifically pointed out that the same content will be engraved on the hardstone tablets in sacred script (i.e., Egyptian hieroglyphs), national scripts (i.e., secular inscriptions, also known as Egyptian cursive scripts) and Greek letters.
This also leaves a key to deciphering the first two texts of the stele, although both of which have been lost, we already know that the content of their accounts is consistent with the Greek text, and the translation can be restored through the Greek content.
By deciphering the stone tablet script, it can also help us grasp the two lost scripts of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Egyptian cursive, and reinterpret the civilization that Has been silent in Egypt for more than two thousand years.
In this way, historians and archaeologists from various European countries have devoted themselves to cracking the writing of the Rosetta Stone Tablet, and the French have made the text on the stone tablet into a rubbing in advance, which has also facilitated the deciphering work.
The first to make some progress was the famous French orientalist Sasi, who was fluent in Syriac, Chaldean, Persian, Turkish and many ancient Arabic languages in the Middle East, and was considered the perfect candidate to decipher the Rosetta Stone script.
Sasi repeatedly studied the secular inscriptions of the second paragraph, and felt that they were very similar to the Arabic alphabets he studied, so he concluded that the secular inscriptions had an element of letters.
Because, he selected several specific phrases from the Greek inscriptions who already knew the contents, hoping to find the corresponding words from the secular inscriptions for deciphering.
But his progress was not smooth, and apart from the identification of a very few phrases that called names, such as Ptolemy and Alexander, the rest of the phrases remained unswitched.
Sasi soon lost interest, but his student Akbrad made some progress.
Akbrad was a Swedish diplomat who studied Orientalism with Sasi in his spare time, especially in the study of ancient Egyptian inscriptions.
After receiving the Rosetta stone inscription from his master Sasi, on the basis of Sasi, he found several phrases in the secular inscription that could correspond to the Greek, and finally determined 16 special words.
But his research, like Master's, soon fell into a bottleneck, and the method of comparing letters with letters alone obviously had no way to understand the laws behind the ancient Egyptian language, and there was no way to overcome the Rosetta Stone.
Moreover, the study of Theasi's disciples was limited to the secular inscriptions in the second part, and had no clue about the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the first part.
At this time, it was a famous physicist who brought another turning point to the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, and he was Thomas Young of England.
Thomas Young, the inventor of the Young's Double Slit Interference Experiment in our high school physics textbook, is a scholar with a wide range of interests, and in addition to physics, he has in-depth research in medicine and paleography.
Thomas Young began his research by obtaining a rubbing of the Rosetta Stone in 1814, and he also applied the rigor and meticulousness of physics to the interpretation of ancient Egyptian scripts.
During the study, Thomas Young grouped the three scripts on the stele for comparative study, first mastering the vocabulary of 86 ancient Greek scripts and Egyptian secular inscriptions, and then summarizing the correspondence between 218 secular inscriptions and 200 hieroglyphs.
On this basis, he determined the correct reading order of hieroglyphs, as well as the different orientation characteristics of human figures, birds and animal symbols on the inscriptions.
In 1819, Thomas Young published his research in the form of a treatise, which was hailed as the creation light of Egyptology, piercing through the darkness that had obscured Egyptian hieroglyphs for many years.
Although Thomas Young took a big step forward in the interpretation of the Rosetta Stone, he could still only read parts of the phrase in fragments, unable to decipher the entire ancient Egyptian language system, and the inscriptions on the stele were still shrouded in dark fog.
Rosetta's stone, in the end, waited to decipher his true destiny, the Frenchman Shang Borian.
The Shang Borian who cracked the Rosetta Stone
Born in 1790, Chambollion was extremely gifted with language from an early age, and miraculously, his appearance was also very oriental, and he was known as the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.
Champolyan began to speak Latin and Greek at the age of 11, and in 1802 came to school in Grenoble, France, where he began to learn Hebrew, as well as Syriac, Arabic and Chaldean, three Semitic languages.
It was also in 1802 that he became acquainted with Fourier, a famous scholar who had followed Napoleon on his expedition to Egypt, and at Fourier's home he first saw a rubbing of rosetta's stone.
Fourier served as the secretary general of the Egyptian Research Institute and presided over the collation and publication of Egyptian archaeological data for a long time, and the Rosetta Stone inscription, which no one could read, had been a piece of his heart disease for many years.
After hearing the origin of the Rosetta Stone, the young and vigorous Shang Bolian vowed to read the inscription on it.
After that, in order to accumulate the foundation of linguistics, Champollion studied many Eastern languages, such as Hebrew, Babylonian, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, etc., and the Chinese became the key to his later decipherment of the Rosetta Stone.
In order to decipher the ancient Egyptian script, he also deliberately learned a dialect of Egypt, Coptic, which is considered to be the language that is most similar to the pronunciation of the ancient Egyptian language.
Champollion began to formally study the writing on rosetta's stone tablets in 1808, and experienced ups and downs due to political turmoil and personal illness, but finally achieved breakthrough results.
This breakthrough came from his correction of a common mistake made by scholars of ancient Egyptian writing.
Speaking of this, it is necessary to talk about the difference between the phonetic script and the ideographic script, the phonetic script is composed of letters that purely represent the pronunciation, the written text cannot directly correspond to the meaning, and the ideographic script is evolved from the graphic that expresses the meaning, and the written text has nothing to do with the pronunciation.
Researchers of the Rosetta Stone in the past generally believe that the ancient script on it is an ideographic script that has nothing to do with the ideograph.
Thomas Young's research went a step further, arguing that there were certain phonetic symbols in it, but he also believed that only foreign names were phonetic.
It was this misunderstanding that led to the inability to establish the entire phonetic and grammatical rules of the ancient Egyptian language.
In an accidental comparison, Champolyan found that there were 1419 symbols in hieroglyphs, far more than the 486 greek words, and if Egyptian hieroglyphs were all ideographic, and one symbol represented a meaning, then the number between them and Greek words should be roughly equal.
From the vast numerical differences between the two, Chambollion deduced that the characters of Egyptian hieroglyphs contained both phonetic symbols and ideographic or other symbols.
At this time, the experience of learning Chinese in the past helped him better understand this unique structure.
Chinese is the oldest language in the world, at first it was a pictographic symbol composed of graphics, and gradually changed from a figure to a square character composed of strokes, and in the process of evolution, the original ideographic hieroglyphs gradually became a text with both ideographic ideography, and finally Chinese characters had a unique structure that combined image, sound and meaning.
The ancient Egyptian script and the Chinese language have the same magic, it is neither a pure alphabetic script nor a pure ideographic script.
In its writing system, in addition to the symbols for special purposes such as qualifiers, it is mainly composed of two major types of symbols, namely phonetic symbols and ideographic symbols, which is a complex writing system that has both ideographic and ideographic meanings.
Inspired by the Chinese language, Champollion became the first scholar to decipher the structure of ancient Egyptian writing.
In 1822, Champerian publicly read his research results at the meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences, which caused a sensation in the academic circles, and two years later, Champollion officially published a monograph "Abstract of the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyph System", which completely deciphered the Rosetta Stone and the Ancient Egyptian Script System, which is known as the pioneering work of Paleo-Egyptology.
Subsequently, Shang Bolian also led a team to Egypt for an investigation, and the local residents rushed to see this "person who can understand the ancient stone stele".
In order to commemorate The bollion's contribution, the floor of the house where he lived as a child is also inscribed with an inscription on the Rosetta Stone for visitors to admire.
The deciphering of the script on the Rosetta Stone also helped us to enrich our understanding of ancient Egyptian civilization, all of which is also credited to the Chinese language.
Resources:
"The Beginning and End of the Declassification of the Rosetta Stone stele in Ancient Egypt", Popular Archaeology, March 2014
"Recreating the Glory of Ancient Egypt Rosetta Stone: Uncovering the Keys to Hieroglyphs," National Human History, March 2020