Discovery at Rosetta

Revealing Ancient Egypt

Jonathan Downs

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781617979699
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

"A real-life story of intrigue, sacrifice and distrust in a country at war—the first complete account of the stone itself."— Ancient Egypt In 1798, young French general Napoleon Bonaparte entered Egypt with a veteran army and a specialist group of savants—scientists, engineers, and artists—his aim being not just conquest, but the rediscovery of the lost Nile kingdom. A year later, in the ruins of an old fort in the small port of Rosetta, the savants made a startling discovery: a large, flat stone, inscribed in Greek, demotic Egyptian, and ancient hieroglyphics. This was the Rosetta Stone, key to the two-thousand-year mystery of hieroglyphs, and to Egypt itself. Two years later, French forces retreated before the English and Ottoman armies, but would not give up the stone. Caught between the opposing generals at the siege of Alexandria, British special agents went in to find the Rosetta Stone, rescue the French savants, and secure a fragile peace treaty. Discovery at Rosetta uses French, Egyptian, and English eyewitness accounts to tell the complete story of the discovery, decipherment, and capture of the Rosetta Stone, investigating the rivalries and politics of the time, and the fate of the stone today.

1

Egypt: The Lost World

Egypt has entranced the world for millennia, acquiring an almost mythical status. Its cryptic inscriptions, colossal temples and monuments led historians and philosophers to believe that here was formed the first civilization of man, here was the source of all knowledge – and here could be found the answers to imponderable universal mysteries. There are few places on earth that have inspired the same romantic associations as the lost world on the Nile – its exotic qualities heightened for many by the threatening, inexorable creep of the desert, gods and goddesses swallowed by seas of shifting sands, consuming the vanities of long-dead kings.

It is understandably difficult for us to appreciate that even to our classical forebears in Greece, Persia or Rome, Egypt was already considered an ancient land. It was believed to be the oldest nation in the world, though this was debated, some believing the same of Phrygia, the realm of King Midas in Asia Minor. According to Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, there was an attempt to resolve this question in the reign of the Pharaoh Psammetichus,¹ who conducted a bizarre experiment to discover the truth of man’s origins: he ordered two newborn infants be given to a shepherd and reared among his flocks, and that they should live beyond the reach of any human voice until they could speak.

It was Psammetichus’ belief that, with no modern tongue to imitate, their first utterance would stem from the root language of all mankind. In the event, reports Herodotus, on one of the daily visits of the shepherd (who kept his charges alone in a hut, far removed from his own home) the two-year-old children cried out for bekos – which was identified as a Phrygian word for bread. Therefore, they concluded, the Phrygian nation must be older than the Egyptian. Herodotus comments on the Greek version of the tale which included other ‘absurdities’, but goes on to say this was what he had been told by the learned Egyptian priests of Heliopolis, whose word was certainly to be trusted.

Despite the evidence of the Phrygian infants, Egypt has the longest continuous written history of any nation on earth. The Turin Canon, written in the thirteenth century BC, provides king lists that identify Menes as the first ruler of the first dynasty of Upper and Lower Egypt in roughly 3100 BC. The Palermo Stone, an Egyptian stele fragment in Sicily since 1866, bears king lists that predate Menes considerably, indicating pre-dynastic rule of Egyptian pharaohs as long ago as 4400 BC. Even discounting these unconfirmed pre-dynastic kings, from Menes to the present, Egypt has historical records of some kind for at least 5,000 years.

The perception of this great-grandfather of the ancient world has varied from civilization to civilization, but we owe much of our inherited interpretation of Egyptian culture to the Greeks. Its deep-rooted religious system with its colossal monuments and temples of a scale beyond even their own drew Greek adventurers, philosophers and merchants to Egyptian shores from the earliest days. Herodotus devoted a significant portion of his great Histories to descriptions of Egypt’s secular and religious practices, its history and geography. ‘It has very many remarkable features and has produced more monuments which beggar belief than anywhere else in the world.’² Egyptians pursued customs that Herodotus described as ‘opposite to other nations’ – their sexual politics (women sold goods in the market while men did the weaving at home), their sailing methods, their dress, their writing – all was different, upside-down, or backward compared with the Greek.³

Greek mercenaries had fought against the Persians in the army of the Pharaoh Amasis (569–526 BC) and Greek merchants inhabited settlements in the Nile Delta, in particular Naucratis and later Alexandria. To Greek philosophers and commentators, Egypt was an ancient and venerable civilization entirely independent of their own cultural traditions – with an alien script of animals and objects which, being familiar, tantalized in its defiance of understanding. Egypt was as mysterious then as it later was to the first European explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Egyptian influence is evident in Greek science and art: Greek thinkers looked upon Egypt as the ancient source of wisdom and religious devotion and reflected this in their architecture and statuary. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, described instances of Greek scholars travelling to Egypt to study – perhaps much in the same way as the Grand Tourists of the eighteenth century looked upon Italy and Greece. Pythagoras and Plato both travelled to Egypt, the latter allegedly to become initiated into the arcane Egyptian mystery schools. Plato ascribed the invention of numbers, arithmetic, astronomy and, above all, writing, to an ancient Egyptian deity he called ‘Theuth’, identified with the sacred ibis. This is also an Egyptian tradition, that the ibis-headed ‘Thoth’ was the god of science who created hieroglyphs and more. Although Pliny mentions Accadian cuneiform and Diodorus Siculus speaks of Ethiopian hieroglyphic writing, it was generally accepted that the Egyptian hieroglyph was the oldest in the world.

There are those who would compare the two cultures of Greece and Egypt to two ends of a spectrum – the Greek, of ‘scientific’ and rational thought, in opposition to the Egyptian, of myth and magic. In Egypt, logical experimentation was entwined with theology, involving their complex pantheon of gods – in contrast to Greece, where philosophers such as Socrates and Plato made deductive reasoning their aim and proved concepts by argument alone – justice was justice, irrespective of the nature of Zeus or Poseidon.

However, to understand Egypt required an understanding of the hieroglyphs, and this was where the Greeks fell short. Unable to decipher the inscriptions and thereby interpret the culture, this impenetrability served only to make Egypt still more exotic, particularly as these symbols were carved on temples large enough for a thousand sons of Zeus. The priests of Egypt were not about to divulge their secret.

The greatest obstacle to the translation of hieroglyphs by the Greeks was their assumption that Egyptian thinking was much as their own. By the fifth century BC, Greek religious beliefs had for some time been viewed by philosophers more as allegories than literal truths, and they mistakenly applied this same allegorical yardstick to Egyptian mythology and its sacred inscriptions. Diodorus Siculus devoted much of his Historic Library to the study of Egypt; he stated plainly that Egyptian writing did not use syllables as in other languages, but instead conveyed its meanings through the significance of the objects depicted and their figurative meaning. According to his confident assertion, the hieroglyphic image of a serpent or hawk would indicate not a sound or a character within a word, but a quality or intent, such as stealth or speed. This approach affected all subsequent European attitudes to Egypt: for centuries it was seen as a land that communicated not by letter but by mystic symbol.⁴

In the third century ad these views eventually resulted in Plotinus’ foundation of a new school of ‘mystic’ Platonic philosophy. This doctrine was to shape western European attitudes to Egypt – and to hieroglyphs – for the next 1,500 years. In this Neoplatonism of Plotinus, hieroglyphic images were seen as occult, esoteric symbols that could reveal the truth of all things only to the initiated philosopher. As a script they became part of a philosophical movement which, with the growth of alchemy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, saw the study of Egypt transformed into more an exercise in metaphysics and mysticism than history. Thus to subsequent generations Egypt became the gateway to ancient wisdom, its portals and mysteries guarded by occult images carved in stone. For many this attitude persists today.

The struggles of the medieval and Renaissance thinkers to uncover the meaning of hieroglyphs seemed secondary to their interest in using Egyptian script and motifs as iconic symbols of mystic philosophy. The study of alchemy, in its lowest form the pursuit of turning base metal into gold, was at its highest a study of disciplines to transcend the physical world in search of divine enlightenment. In this search, the supposed Egyptian mysteries once more played their part, with hieroglyphs relegated to the role of symbols laden with hidden meaning. However, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the study of hieroglyphs increasingly became more a matter of science than philosophy, and this led to the first appearance of an Egyptian script in Europe. The wealthy noble Roman traveller and collector Pietro della Valle (1586–1652) spent twelve years touring the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East. As well as an extensive collection of antiquities, he returned with documents from Egypt that included rare manuscripts detailing Coptic grammar and vocabulary. Coptic was a form of the ancient spoken tongue of Pharaonic Egypt, but was not devised as a written language until the second century AD, using a combination of Greek letters and new characters to convey particular Egyptian sounds not expressed by the Greek alphabet.⁵ Della Valle’s manuscripts formed the foundation of new European studies in Coptic, an introduction to which was published by the great Jesuit thinker and Renaissance scholar Athanasius Kircher in 1636. This became the first sample of an Egyptian language published in a European tongue. Consequently, Kircher’s introduction to Coptic is regarded as one of the first works of Egyptology– it was followed in 1644 by the publication of Della Valle’s Coptic grammar keys and vocabulary. A contemporary of Galileo, and a student of the hermetic philosophy so popular in the Renaissance, Kircher produced landmark works in Egyptology, proclaiming his belief in the holistic nature of Egyptian religion and script – the most accurate assessment of hieroglyphics before their eventual translation.

In the eighteenth century, the emphasis shifted to the practical and tangible pursuits of archaeology. Rome became the natural centre for these new studies, and researchers and amateur antiquaries flocked to the old capital. The 1700s were to witness no less than the birth of both a new type of science, and a new type of scientist.

By the end of the 1700s, the ‘antiquary’, a dedicated collector of antiquities, had become something of a professional historical detective. This was a far cry from the misguided enthusiast of the previous century, who had sought strange objects to fill his often valueless cabinet of curiosities – coins arranged according to colour, or size, the unidentifiable detritus of dubiousperiod laid next to the occasional rare artefact, the collector unaware of the true nature of his collection. By contrast, British antiquarian researchers of the eighteenth century were used regularly in great topographical and sociological surveys as far-reaching as the Domesday Book; they could analyse ancient road networks or river courses, and determine through excavation the shifting patterns of the social and economic welfare of people, and the evolution of the landscape. Antiquarianism was more than the birth of modern archaeology – it was the application of a new way of looking at history, through studied, detailed observation and comparison, rather than solely by reference to classical authorities.

Previously, the social status of antiquaries had been uncertain: by nature the antiquary concentrated on his chosen subject often to the exclusion of all else, whereas the educated gentleman did not – he had a broad, useful, general knowledge. Although the sciences became more defined in the latter half of the eighteenth century, history, aesthetics and art came to blend with the rise of the wealthy connoisseur. Soon there was no stopping the tidal wave of excitement for antiquity within the moneyed classes: to have an interest in the aesthetic quality of the past and the beauty of bygone civilizations was soon accepted as part of a cultured gentleman’s education.

Important research findings were often reported to the gatherings of the august Royal Society. Here, at the ‘invisible college’ of natural philosophers, all ‘physico-mathematicall and experimentall learning’ was to be pursued. The majority of members of this learned society and others were keen amateurs who grew to become dedicated collectors. Some of their artefacts would later adorn the new British Museum, founded primarily to house a collection of more than 71,000 objects willed to the nation by the great naturalist and antiquary Sir Hans Sloane, upon his death in 1753. Sloane, the archetypal gentleman scientist of his age, was president of both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society. Many of his acquaintances gathered pieces for him on their travels and his collection swelled accordingly – although his bequest included over 150 Egyptian objects, they were not colossal statuary or refined sculpture, but small curiosities, collected arbitrarily rather than with any archaeological intent.

The popular reawakening of interest in antiquity was fuelled by excavations at Herculaneum, which began in 1738, and Pompeii, in 1748. The works attracted swarms of enthusiasts who travelled to Italy to study and, above all, collect antiquities. A fire had been kindled in cultural circles across northern Europe, and these collectors looked south to the Mediterranean. Travel to France and Italy had been an essential part of upperclass education since the 1500s, when it had become fashionable for young aristocrats to visit Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome as the pinnacle of their classical education. Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, one of several candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, was often called the ‘Italian Earl’ owing to his extraordinary classical knowledge and the tastes he acquired during his travels. Over the next two hundred years this fascination for the ancient world increased dramatically. The neoclassical movement in art in the eighteenth century generated an ever-increasing interest in classical antiquity, its artists expressing a love for classical harmony and proportion – characteristics most visible in the surviving architecture of Rome and Greece.

Although Italy was key to the Grand Tour, adventurous travellers went further afield. Archaeologists and antiquaries, explorers and travellers eventually forced a path to the more ancient Greek remains of Athens and the islands – few would venture to the Asiatic interior of the Ottoman Empire or even Cyprus or Alexandria, as these involved longer sea-journeys. The rewards of such voyages were made evident when William Lethieullier returned from Turkey and Egypt in 1756, bringing with him the first mummy to be displayed in the British Museum. The attitude of many north Europeans to the Asian or African landscape of antiquity is exemplified in a letter from Alexandria by Charles Sloane to his brother: he wrote with some distaste of ‘the barbarians’ who inhabited the country, continuing to do what they had done for ages, namely, to ‘destroy everything of antiquity remaining’.⁶ For this very reason, archaeological collecting was seen by antiquaries as preservation rather than random looting or theft. With their own reawakening to a classical past, the intellectual European elite eventually came to feel they had a greater claim to antiquity than the inhabitants surrounded by it – inhabitants who, in allowing their great artistic achievements to fall into ruin or be consumed by the deserts, displayed what was interpreted as a mystifying cultural apathy. Many travellers distinguished ancient Greeks and ancient Egyptians from their modern descendants, who seemed corrupt and benighted to the touring aesthetes, who worshipped the faded fantasy of the former but despised and distrusted the latter.

There was little doubt that North Africa west of Alexandria was dangerous. Thomas Shaw, a chaplain in Algiers and later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, made a tour of Egypt, Sinai and Cyprus in 1721. On occasions he headed into the wilder interior of ‘Barbary’ and subsequently, in 1738, wrote his famous Travels or Observations relating to several parts of Barbary and the Levant. James Bruce became another famous traveller and tourist; in the second half of the eighteenth century he explored Spain, Portugal and Italy and was later appointed consul in Algiers in 1763. He spent a year on an archaeological tour of North Africa, in the process sketching the Roman ruins of Carthage. Although Egypt was still terra incognita, Bruce made an attempt to penetrate the interior but suffered horrendous privations and ordeals: he endured shipwreck, robbery, capture and five months’ imprisonment at the hands of natives on the edge of the Nubian desert, before making it finally to the upper reaches of the Nile.

This was far from tourism in any sense of the word – this was exploration. Few travellers attempted it, most keeping to Italy, Greece and Spain, though even this was still not for the faint-hearted. Travel was difficult enough in mainland Europe with its treacherous, ill-kept roads, exhausting coach travel and sites often accessible only to the hardiest of adventurers. Egypt offered little of the restorative comforts of Rome or the opulent salons of royal Naples, but was ruled by destructive savages of an alien culture and religion. As if this were not reason enough to avoid it, Egypt was set within the equally menacing Ottoman Empire, a monstrous force crouched on the shores of Asia, which only a century earlier had sent its invading hordes as far as the gates of Vienna. To the Grand Tourist Egypt was a lost world, the romance of its setting tainted by its barbarous keepers, the glories of its past fallen into ruin, its shattered remains lying scattered in the sands, neglected, unappreciated. How the land of the pharaohs had sunk into such a state is a story of gradual decline rather than cataclysmic destruction: Horus, the oneeyed god who had first unified the Nile kingdoms, must have wept the tears of heaven to see his Eden so despoiled.

Egypt’s fall is a chronicle of the ebb and flow of foreign empires, dated by many from the invasion of the Assyrians under Esarhaddon in 671 BC, centuries before the full flowering of Greece or Rome. A Levantine revolt against Esarhaddon’s father, King Sennacherib, had been supported by Egyptian and Nubian forces, and to safeguard against future attack, the A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Ded
• Contents
• Forword
• Acknowledge
• Illustration
• Maps
• Intro
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Epilogue
• Appendix1
• Appendix2
• Appendix3
• Appendix4
• Appendix5
• Notes
• Bibliography