To date, humanity has a history of hundreds of thousands of years. In such a long history, mankind has created countless brilliant civilizations.
The birth of these civilizations is not only a sign of human evolution, but also a representative of social formation.
However, with the continuous development of society, in the vast river of history, there are always some civilizations that have been annihilated in history, and there are also some civilizations that can transcend time and endure in the long river of history.
In the famous British Museum in the United Kingdom, one of the most famous artifacts is the "Rosetta Stone" from Egypt.
The stone stele is not worth noting, and the reason why this stele is noticed is because this stele is carved with a large number of dense inscriptions.
Since the inscriptions are ancient Egyptian scripts, modern texts cannot be deciphered. This problem has plagued Western scholars for 20 years, but the writing was eventually deciphered in Chinese by a Chinese linguist.
The source of the stele
The stele is called the Rosetta Stone, and it was discovered by Napoleon's soldiers during his expedition to Egypt in 1799 when they entered a small village in the Nile Delta.
After the soldiers found the stone stele, they hurriedly dug up the stele. After digging, the words on the stone tablets came into view. The soldiers found that there were three different scripts on the stele.
Subsequently, the soldiers reported the stone tablets to Napoleon, who learned of them and found many scholars to translate them, but at that time, due to the low level of education, no one could translate them.
Napoleon knew that the stele must have some significance, so he ordered that the stele be transported to Cairo so that scholars could continue to study the translation.
In 1801, France was defeated, and Britain, as the victorious power, forced France to sign a series of treaties, including the handover of the stele to Britain.
Since then, the stele has been preserved by the British in the name of war booty in the British Museum.
The inscription was deciphered by scholars in Chinese characters
Twenty years later, the inscription on the stele was deciphered by a scholar in The Chinese language.
From the time Napoleon discovered the stele, until the Chinese linguist, it was not nothing. As soon as the stele arrived at the British Museum in Britain, a British scholar translated the inscription.
He translated the ancient Greek at the bottom of the stele into English, and only then did people understand the origin of the stele.
However, English did not allow the scholar to translate all the words on the stele, and the meaning of the stele text is still an unknown mystery.
Later, when a French Chinese linguist saw the inscription on rosetta's stone, his first reaction was that the words and Chinese characters on this stone tablet had something in common.
After research, it was found that the writing on the stele was very similar to Chinese characters in terms of language structure and text structure. For example, some chinese characters have a partial initial that is a homophony of this Chinese character, while ancient Egyptian scripts also have such characteristics.
Because this scholar was proficient in Chinese characters, he transferred the interpretation of hieroglyphs in Chinese characters to ancient Egyptian scripts, and finally deciphered the meaning of the inscriptions.
In ancient times and different historical periods, Egyptian hieroglyphs also changed many times with the development of society, which is why it was difficult for early scholars to decipher the meaning of inscriptions.
In ancient Egypt, during the Chinese king period, the priestly body appeared, and in the later period, the folk script appeared. By the time of Roman rule, Coptic scripts appeared.
It was a script that evolved from the Greek alphabet, however, due to historical factors, this script did not develop into an alphabetic script.
The hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt have great similarities with the hieroglyphs of ancient China. In general , hieroglyphs consist of ideograms , ideographs , and radicals.
Among them, the ideography is used to represent the meaning of some words, but it cannot express the pronunciation, and the epiphonic part is used to express the pronunciation, which is represented by some graphics.
The initial part is to distinguish the pronunciation of similar words, and our Chinese characters also have radicals, and the role of the radicals in the text is similar.
However, due to the protracted war and the relative difficulty of the structure of Egyptian hieroglyphs, no changes or simplifications have been made in the course of history.
Therefore, with the demise of ancient Egypt, Egyptian hieroglyphs were gradually replaced by other scripts, and people slowly forgot the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
However, it is precisely because the structure of hieroglyphs and the idea of making characters have in common with Chinese characters that this scholar was able to decipher the meaning of the inscription in Chinese.
Meaning of the inscription
Through the interpretation of the inscription, people understand the true meaning of this inscription. It turns out that the stele was a letter of thanks written in 196 BC by some monks in ancient Egypt in praise of the king of the time.
During his reign, the king not only abolished the monks' taxes, but also provided a new source of income for the monks' daily expenses.
At the same time, the king also strongly supported the monks in spreading these ideas, providing a series of measures for the construction and protection of the temple. It was precisely because of the king's kindness that the monks were very grateful to the king.
Therefore, the monks wrote this letter of gratitude and carved it on the stone tablet in two languages.
Because of such a historically significant stone monument, the city where the stone monument was found is also famous all over the world. This stone stele is also in the British Museum.
summary
In the face of many ancient civilizations, we must study its meaning as soon as possible, so as not to make it disappear in the end.
In order to be able to better study these ancient civilizations, we will unite all the cultures of human beings around the world and try each method. By experimenting and contrasting to reach the best conclusions, the inscription is a good example.
Only by uniting the civilizations of the whole world can the treasures of human civilization be interpreted.