WhatIstheRottaStone？
Meilan Solly
Associate Editor, History
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When Jean-François Champollion, a 31-year-old Frenchman who’d dedicated his life to the study of ancient Egypt, burst into his brother’s Paris office on September 14, 1822, he made an emphatic declaration—“Je tiens mon affaire!” (“I’ve got it!”)—then promptly collapd. According to popular lore, the philologist, or scholar of historical languages, only recovered from his fainting spell five days later.
The dramatic nature of Champollion’s announcement was emblematic of his idiosyncratic c
haracter. (The scholar, says writer Edward Dolnick, was “an over-the-top, histrionic, melodramatic figure, always bursting with ecstasy or despondent in miry.”) But his reaction was also far from hyperbolic, considering the significance of the discovery in question. As Champollion revealed to a room of his peers nearly two weeks later, he’d solved one of history’s greatest mysteries: how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs and, by extension, unlock the crets of the ancient civilization.
The key to this centuries-old dilemma was an unassuming slab of granodiorite unearthed in Egypt in July 1799. Dubbed the Rotta Stone after the town where it was found, the stela fragment features versions of the same decree in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic (esntially a shorthand form of hieroglyphs) and ancient Greek.
属猪人今日运势In theory, the juxtapod inscriptions should’ve been easy to decipher, as scholars at the time knew ancient Greek and could therefore piece together the hieroglyphic translation bad on the Greek message. “The first people to look at the Rotta Stone thought it would take two weeks to decipher,” says Dolnick, author of The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rotta Stone. “It ended up taking 20 years.”
What is the Rotta Stone?
The Rotta Stone is a fragment of a larger slab erected at an Egyptian temple in 196 B.C.E., during the reign of Ptolemy V, a 跪乳之恩Ptolemaic king走在乡间的小路上简谱 of Macedonian Greek ancestry. Its surface is inscribed with a decree issued by a council of Egyptian priests on the anniversary of Ptolemy’s coronation.
Despite the stone’s later significance, the text itlf is relatively mundane, listing the king’s accomplishments before reminding readers of his divinity and affirming his royal cult. (Read the full decree here.) The priests conclude their message by ordering that the decree be inscribed on stelae “in the writing of the words of the gods, and the writing of the books and in the writing of [the Greeks].” The copies, in turn, were distributed at temples across the kingdom.
Developed around three millennia earlier, in 3100 B.C.E., hieroglyphs (the noun form of the word, as oppod to the adjective “hieroglyphic”) are pictorial symbols ud to write the ancient Egyptian language. By Ptolemy’s time, some 3,000 years after hieroglyphs’ cr
eation, the elaborate script was mainly ud 开洋冬瓜by priests (hence the Rotta Stone’s reference to “the words of the gods”), with the general public more often using the simpler Demotic. (For a n of just how long ancient Egypt thrived, writes Dolnick, consider this: “Cleopatra came at the very end of Egypt’s imperial run, 13 centuries after King Tut, 20 centuries after the golden age of Egyptian literature, 26 centuries after the Great Pyramid.” To put it in another context, the reign of Cleopatra is clor to the year 2022 than it is to when the pyramids were built.)
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Possible reconstruction of the original stone slab A. Parrot via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0
As Ilona Regulski, a curator of Egyptian written culture at the British Muum, which has houd the Rotta Stone since 1802, says, “Egypt was a very multicultural society at the time, … and tho who could read and write were able to do so in more than one language. So it was quite common in that time to translate any kind of formal writing into other scripts, whether it was Egyptian to Greek or Greek to Egyptian.”
The council issued its decree in the midst of the Great Revolt (206 to 186 B.C.E.), a poorly documented uprising sparked by long-brewing tensions between the Greek Ptolemaic rulers and their Egyptian subjects. Egyptian veterans of a war spearheaded by Ptolemy V’s father “returned home unwilling to accept their role as cond-class citizens and actively pushed for the return of Egyptian leadership,” per 老同是什么意思Archaeology magazine. The Rotta Stone references the events directly, detailing how Ptolemy, who succeeded his father around 204 B.C.E., captured an enemy town, “cut to pieces the rebels who were therein, and … made an exceedingly great slaughter among them.” Ebullient in its prai of the young king, the decree is esntially “a propaganda poster carved in stone,” says Dolnick.
How was the Rotta Stone discovered?
At some point after its creation in 196 B.C.E., the Rotta Stone was broken into pieces, leaving its inscriptions incomplete. Originally part of a taller slab, the surviving fragment contains 14 lines in hieroglyphic script, 32 in Demotic and 53 in ancient Greek. The top a
nd bottom right ctions of the stone remain unaccounted for despite archaeologists’ efforts to locate them.
Around 1470, builders constructing a fort a few miles northwest of the port town of Rashid, or Rotta, incorporated the fragment into a wall. It remained there until July 1799, when a member of a French team tasked with rebuilding the now-dilapidated fort identified the stone as an object of significance. (Pierre-François Bouchard, the French officer in charge of the unit, is often credited with the discovery, but as Dolnick notes in The Writing of the Gods, it’s more likely that an unknown Egyptian laborer spotted the slab.)网名2个字霸气
