THE LESSON OF THE ROSETTA STONE


The Rosetta Stone enabled an ancient civilisation to be unlocked


One of the star attractions of the British Museum must surely be the Rosetta Stone not far from the front entrance.

I first stumbled on its existence when ambling along and was struck, first and foremost, by the crowds that surrounded it. It is a fail-safe rule that if something is popular there must be a cause for the attraction.

In the case of the Rosetta Stone, unfortunately, the kernel of that is not anything particularly colourful or flamboyant.

It is a key – a key to an entire civilisation which had hitherto been partially a locked secret although its artefacts in ruinous state were to be found up and down the Nile Valley.

The reason why we as South Asians should pay the Rosetta Stone more than passing interest is that it may signal how we will be remembered if the world knows us no more in generations yet to come.

The civilisation of the ancient Egyptians is of more than academic interest because it survives in altered form to this day.

All persons born or brought up in any of the three great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have the basis of their belief system rooted firmly in the Old Testament or Torah.

If the Biblical account is reliable, and religious people think it is, it seems to be the case that Moses was, if not born into Egyptian civilisation, then at least brought up in it.

Furthermore, if the story in the book of Genesis is to be relied upon, he was raised and educated in the court of the then Pharaoh. Historians are not sure which Pharaoh it was.

Since Moses was the writer of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and the source of the laws therein it must surely follow that his Egyptian culture must have played a monumental part in the framing of Judaism which, in the fullness of time, brought about Christianity and Islam, the last of the revealed religions.

Furthermore, the ancient Egyptians were the leading edge of thought and technology at the time. Their architecture was unrivalled then and since and their science was the basis of later Greek advancements.

For example, it was in ancient Egypt that the size of the Earth was first computed by measuring the length of the sun’s shadows at midday at two different points at known dissimilar latitudes.

In any event, the mere fact that the Jews, that remarkable race, lived in ancient Egypt for 400 years or so is justification in itself for looking closely at the civilisation.

The Rosetta Stone was found in this way: The French under Napoleon during the 1798 Egyptian campaign had brought archaeologists to Egypt.
Army engineer Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard found the stone on July 15, 1799 and realised that it was important.
After the French surrender a dispute arose over the fate of archaeological and scientific discoveries in Egypt.
How exactly the Stone came to British hands is disputed. Colonel Tompkins Hilgrove Turner claimed later that he had personally seized the stone and carried it away on a gun carriage.
It was brought to Britain aboard a captured French frigate L'Egyptienne on February 1802.Later it was taken to the British Museum where it has been ever since.
The Rosetta Stone is a stone with writing on it in two languages (Egyptian and Greek), using three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek).
It is written in three scripts because when it was written, there were three scripts being used in Egypt.
The first, hieroglyphic, was the script used for important or religious documents.
The second, demotic, was the common language of the people.
The third, Greek, was the language of the rulers of Egypt at that time.
The Rosetta Stone was written in all three scripts so that the priests, government officials and rulers of Egypt could all read what it said. It is believed to have been carved in 196 BC in Rosetta (Rashid).
The Rosetta Stone is a text written by a group of priests in Egypt to honour the Egyptian pharaoh. It lists all the things that the pharaoh has done that were good for the priests and the people.
Many people worked on deciphering hieroglyphs over several hundred years. However, the structure of the script was difficult to work out.
After many years of studying the Rosetta Stone and other examples of ancient Egyptian writing, Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822.
Champollion could read both Greek and Coptic.
He was able to work out what the seven demotic signs in Coptic were. By looking at how these signs were used in Coptic he was able to work out what they stood for. Then he began tracing these demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs.
By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he could make educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs stood for.
This is the translation of the Rosetta Stone in English:

”The high priests and prophets, and those who enter the inner shrine in order to robe the gods, and those who wear the hawks wing, and the sacred scribes, and all the other priests who have assembled at Memphis before the king, from the various temples throughout the country, for the feast of his receiving the kingdom, even that of Ptolemy the ever-living, beloved by Ptah, the God Manifest and Gracious, which he received from his Father, being assembled in the temple in Memphis this day, declared:

”Since King Ptolemy, the ever-living, beloved by Ptah, the God Manifest and Gracious, the son of King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoë, the Parent-loving Gods, has done many benefactions to the temples and to those who dwell in them and also to all those subjects to his rule, being from the beginning a god born of a god and a goddess like Horus, the son of Isis and Osirus, who came to the help of his Father Osirus being benevolently disposed toward the gods, has concentrated to the temples revenues both of silver and of grain, and has generously undergone many expenses in order to lead Egypt to prosperity and to establish the temples... the gods have rewarded him with health, victory, power, and all other good things, his sovereignty to continue to him and his children forever.”
The point I want to make is that Champollion was an astute and deep scholar who used the typical Western method of discovery learning.
Basically, he was faced with three languages namely the hieroglyphics, the demotic language of Egypt at the time and the Greek. Of these he knew the Greek and needed to know the meaning of the hieroglyphics.
In our culture and way of thinking the revelatory method has become the dominant way of learning. This is underwritten in our religion and has spread out into our culture.
What it amounts to is that there is a teacher in the form of a human being or a book or a CD or tape or whatever else in the form of a teaching tool and there is the learner. The learner learns from the teacher and that is that. No teacher no learning.
I submit that this is a significant reason why we seem unable to make independent progress. We send our young people abroad to study in foreign universities thereby wasting precious and scanty stocks of foreign exchange and need to be constantly updated by others to keep up with the modern world.
Nobody seems to need to be updated by us and we make no discoveries to amaze third parties with.
The Western method is the exact opposite in many ways. Sure, they sit around and learn from teachers and books too, but they do more.
The typical Western scientist constantly sifts and compares and contrasts while experimenting all the time. He is not deterred by failure and records the results of all the failures assiduously.
What this amounts to is that instead of allowing himself to be acted upon by the teaching influence exclusively he actively probes the subject matter under investigation and sees how it reacts in different circumstances. Then he draws conclusions and eventually a theory.
Some philosophers call this the deductive and inductive methods of reasoning. If my understanding is sound, the deductive way creates a set of premises and reasons from them what the final outcome is before seeing if that happens. The inductive method is based on observation and draws conclusions from them.
If I understand rightly, a man can set out as a premise that dropped things fall down and can then drop something a hundred times to see if it falls a hundred times or not by way of deductive reasoning.
He can also start by noticing that a hundred different things when dropped fall down and reckon that dropped things fall down, by way of inductive reasoning. In other words, if all the swans I have ever seen are white then it follows that the next swan I see will be white.
In the case of the Rosetta Stone a great deal of emphasis was put on cartouches featuring the name of Ptolemy which was in both the Greek and the and the hieroglyphics. That was part of the unravelling of the clues which enables a locked language to be opened and allowed Egyptologists to understand a whole civilisation.
In our situation, unless we emulate that way of doing things we will surely be sunk.

THE END

This article was published in the Bangla Mirror newspaper, the first English language weekly for the United Kingdom's Bangladeshis - read everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the sub-Antarctic.