Learning to Read Egypt: Hieroglyphics and the Rosetta Stone
As I believe I mentioned recently, European scholars at the time of the Renaissance rediscovered ancient Egypt in the writings of classical Greece.* Like the ancient Greeks before them, they believed Egypt was the source of art, religion, and science: a land of mystery and arcane knowledge.
The belief in Egypt as a land of “lost knowledge” was reinforced by the fact that no one could read the script the Greeks had dubbed “hieroglyphs”, or “sacred carving”.** Attempts to decode hieroglyphics started with the ancient Greeks, and were continued by their intellectual heirs in the Islamic golden age. When a manuscript about hierglyphs by the Greek scholar Horapollon arrived in Florence in 1422, European scholars joined in the fun.
Most European scholars*** assumed that hieroglyphics were a magical symbology rather than an alphabet—a false hypothesis that made decipherment virtually impossible. Even Athanasius Kircher,**** who correctly assumed that hieroglyphics were linked to an earlier form of the Coptic language, was led astray by his belief that they also held a hidden layer of symbolic meaning.
Scholars interested in hieroglyphics received their first break in 1799, when French soldiers stationed near the city of Rosetta in the Nile delta discovered a black basalt slab with inscriptions in hieroglyphics, demotic and classical Greek. *****
The arrangement of the inscriptions suggested that all three contained the same text—the classical equivalent of a magic decoder ring. Plaster casts and copies of the Rosetta Stone spread across Europe. Scholars in England, Germany, France and Italy attempted to use the Greek inscription to translate its hieroglyphic counterpart.
One scholar in particular threw himself into the attempt. Young French linguist Jean-François Champollion had been obsessed with hieroglyphics since he was ten and had spent his life preparing to study them. Already competent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, at thirteen he began learning Arabic, Syrian, Chaldean, Coptic and Chinese. He studied the few excerpts he could find in Zend, Pahlavi and Farsi. At seventeen, he took on Sanskrit and Persian. At eighteen, he made his first attempt to decode the Rosetta Stone inscriptions.
In 1821, the 31-year-old Champollion published a methodology for decoding the inscriptions. In a combination of intuition and reason, he began with the names of kings. The Greek inscription was a decree issued in 196 BCE, praising King Ptolemy Epiphanes. The hieroglyphic inscription included a group of signs enclosed in an oval ring, now known as a cartouche. Champollion deduced, correctly, that these signs spelled out the king’s name, providing a key for decoding the remaining inscription.
Hieroglyphics were a mystery no longer. Pyramids, though, were still up for grabs.
*Not to mention the Old Testament, where the picture of Egypt was less positive but just as powerful.
** The Greeks also identified two other types of ancient Egyptian writing: hieratic (priestly), a cursive form of hieroglyphics that was still used for sacred documents at the time of ancient Greece, and demotic (common), a script used for secular documents.
***Including Sir Isaac Newton. We tend to remember his work on physics and mathematics and forget his studies in alchemy and interpretation of Biblical prophecies.
**** Seventeenth century Jesuit priest and polymath, variously described as the last Renaissance man and the last man who knew everything.
****Modeling himself on Alexander the Greek, Napoleon had invaded Egypt the year before with twin armies of soldiers and scholars.
Blood Sisters
With the discovery of Richard III's bones under a Leister parking lot, the Wars of the Roses are in the news again. Historians and hobbyists alike are arguing the relative claims of Lancaster and York across the media. In Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood tells the familiar story of the so-called "Cousins' War" from a new perspective.
As Gristwood points out, most histories of the period echo the "patriarchial assumptions" of the time and focus on its male protagonists. In Blood Sisters, kings and kingmakers take a back seat to their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. Some, like heiress Anne Neville, were passed from one royal family to another like pieces of property. Others were actively involved in the politics of the time, using husbands and sons as their path to power. Whether pawns or players, all were caught up in the web of changing alliances, family loyalties and political machinations that defined the war. Gristwood pieces together their stories from their household accounts, their occasional letters, and their appearances in the accounts of others.
At its heart, Blood Sisters is about relationships. Gristwood describes the events surrounding the Wars of the Roses and the resultant rise of the Tudor dynasty as a family saga whose protagonists were tied together in numerous ways. By focusing on the lives of the Plantagenet women, she illustrates the complexities of those ties--creating a larger picture of the Wars of the Roses in the process.
This review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Black Athena
A recent exchange with a slightly disgruntled reader of Mankind: The Story of All of Us * led me to pull a book off the shelf that I hadn't looked at for several years: the first volume of Martin Bernal's Black Athena .
Sub-titled The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Bernal's book was a smack up the side of the head when I first read it at the suggestion of my dissertation adviser. (I was stuck in a section on nineteenth century representations of ancient Egypt.**) Bernal's book was no help with my chapter, but it fundamentally changed how I look at the ancient past.
Briefly, Bernal argues that Europeans*** from the Renaissance to the eve of Romanticism****, as well as the ancient Greeks themselves, found the roots of classical Greek culture in ancient Egypt. In the early nineteenth century, a creative and occasionally toxic blend of Romantic Hellenism, imperialism, racism, and the new sciences of linguistics and archaeology relocated the cradle of western civilization from Egypt to Greece. In the new formulation, Greeks had created civilization as we know it but they couldn't be trusted to write their own history.
Black Athena was controversial at best when it first came out in 1987. Even though elements of Bernal's arguments have been incorporated into our model of western civilization, they remain controversial. Personally, primed by Edward Said's Orientalism***** and a post-modern intellectual stew of Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, and company, I found Bernal's arguments compelling and believable.
I still do.
* Inevitably, any passionate history nerd is going to be slightly disgruntled about some part of Mankind, including me. One of the harsh realities of writing a book that covers history from the Big Bang to yesterday is that things have to be left out. Even really important things.
**Part of a chapter that I wrote many, many times before I realized it didn't belong in the book.
***Or at least Europeans who had both the luxury and inclination to think about such things. My guess is the butcher, the baker, and the average wealthy merchant didn't care. Some things don't change.
****As you doubtless remember, Europeans before the Renaissance didn't spend a lot of time thinking about classical Greece.
*****Another paradigm buster, which deserves its own blog post.