[music playing]
Welcome back.
Today we’ll discuss the first attempt
to decipher the Rosetta Stone.
From the very beginning, there was
no mystery about what the Rosetta Stone said.
Many of the savants in Egypt with Bonaparte
could read the Greek section.
It was basically a thank you note written in 196 BC
from the priests of Egypt to King Ptolemy
V, the Greek ruler of Egypt.
Ptolemy had granted some favors to the priests,
especially reducing their taxes.
So they erected the stela to thank him.
After listing the specific benefits granted
to the priests, they also thank him
for general kindness to the people-- releasing prisoners,
restoring sacred buildings, and things like that.
Stelae, which is the plural of stela,
was the bulletin boards of ancient Egypt.
If you wanted something known, you
carved it on a round-topped stone
and erected it in front of a temple, where
everyone would see it.
The Rosetta Stone was one of these.
The hieroglyphic script at the top is the most damaged.
And a great deal of it’s missing.
Originally, the stela was round-topped and probably
had a winged sun at the top and a procession of the gods
with Pharaoh Ptolemy V.
The second script was called demotic by Herodotus,
from the Greek for "people," because it
was what the people used for business, letters, and things
like that.
It’s an extremely cursive form of hieroglyphs,
used extensively during the late and Ptolemaic periods.
The Greek script at the bottom is the most complete
and is important for several reasons.
First, it gave a readable version of the text.
Second, at the end it says that the stela contained
the same message in sacred characters--
hieroglyphs-- native characters--
demotic-- and Greek characters.
This was a critical bit of information.
It made clear that the three scripts all said the same thing
and thus provided a strategy for decipherment.
Third, it provided the name Ptolemy,
which would prove to be the most important of all clues.
The French discovered the Rosetta Stone.
But it was an Englishman who started the ball rolling.
Thomas Young was perhaps the greatest scientist of his time.
A polymath, he’s best remembered for the wave theory of light.
But he also made contributions to physiology,
and as we shall see, Egyptology.
Schooled in Greek, Latin, and other languages,
he began working on deciphering the Rosetta Stone
during his summer vacations.
But Young was working under the mistaken belief
that hieroglyphs were primarily ideographic,
that they were picture writing.
As we will see, he was not the only one laboring under what
I call "the big mistake."
His great insight however, was that the name Ptolemy, which
he saw in the Greek text, must also
appear in the demotic and hieroglyphic text as well.
He realized that the hieroglyphs and demotic characters
for the name couldn’t be ideographic.
It couldn’t be a picture.
Because there is no picture of what a Ptolemy looked like.
So at least for names, there must be an alphabet.
Others before Young had suggested
that the ovals, called cartouches by Bonaparte’s men,
because they looked like cartridge shells,
held the names of the kings.
Young agreed.
And he began to work on the cartouche.
He figured that hieroglyphs inside the cartouche
must correspond to letters of the alphabet,
spelling out Ptolemy.
The rectangle must be a P. The semicircle, a T. The loop,
an O. The lion, an L.
The statue base, an M. The reed leaf, maybe a Y with the reed
leaves.
And the folded cloth, an S.
Ptolmis.
The Greek version of the name is actually Ptolemeos.
But it’s pretty close.
Young figured out this approximation.
He now had seven letters of the alphabet.
Decipherment wasn’t easy.
To give you an idea of what this pioneering work was like,
let me put you in Thomas Young’s shoes for a couple of minutes.
I want you to look at a temple wall
and see what you can figure out.
Remember, at this stage, Thomas Young
knew less about hieroglyphs and Egyptian civilization
than you do.
Before we get to the hieroglyphs,
let’s look at the big picture.
We can see two people making offerings to the gods.
The man holds an incense burner.
Incense was called, "what the gods like to smell."
He wears the double crown, the tall white crown of upper Egypt
and the short red crown of Lower Egypt.
So he’s probably a King.
There are two cartouches in front of him.
So that’s more evidence that he’s the King.
Behind him we see a queen.
We can see her cartouches too.
She’s wearing an elaborate headdress,
consisting of horns and a solar disk,
often worn by the goddesses Isis and Hathor.
In her right hand, she holds a sistrum,
a musical instrument a bit like a rattle
that was used in rituals.
In her other hand, she holds a keyhole-shaped object,
called a menat.
Priestesses of Hathor often wore heavy decorative pectorals
around their necks, this would have
created a strain on the neck.
So they wore menats, counterweights made of metal,
that hung down the back.
It took the weight off the neck.
So we have a King and a queen making offerings to the gods.
But who are the king and queen?
That’s the kind of question Thomas Young
was wrestling with.
Let’s look at the cartouches, ladies first.
Let’s begin with the one in front.
First hieroglyph, it’s small, just above the lion’s back.
It’s the hill sign, a Q.
You’ll remember a lion was an L in Ptolemaic times.
So we have Q-L. But from our earlier discussions,
you know the Q was also a K. So you’ve probably already figured
out it’s Cleopatra.
We can see the lasso O that was used in Ptolemaic times.
There’s the rectangle P. We have a vulture, A.
We have a hand beneath the vulture,
and beneath that is our mouth, R.
And finally, another vulture.
Cleopatra.
You were right.
On either side of the last vulture are an egg
and a loaf T. Both indicate a female name.
Young would figure that out later.
You probably noticed that the cartouche has been defaced.
The animals have been chiseled out.
It’s strange, and I don’t know why this was done.
In later times, the Christians chiseled out
the faces of the gods and kings and queens so they
would lose their powers.
That, by the way, is where we get our term defaced.
But just defacing the animals is very unusual.
OK, we have Cleopatra.
But which one?
There were seven Cleopatras.
Let’s look at her other cartouche.
This one reads from right to left.
So we start with P-T-O-L-- you’ve got it already, Ptolemy.
This just reaffirms that our queen is a Ptolemy.
There’s an M, the statue base M, under the lion.
Then the double reed leaf, which is a Y. Then a folded cloth S,
for the Greek ending, Ptolemeos.
Now all the other hieroglyphs that follow
would tell us which Cleopatra she
is, if we could decipher them.
But like Thomas Young, we can’t.
So we don’t know.
But we can, however, spot a name we
know at the bottom right of the cartouche.
Do you see it?
Ptah.
So this queen has Ptah in her title.
Just to the left of the Ptah is the name Isis.
It’s the throne and egg and tea hieroglyphs.
We’ll talk about all the names of the gods in a later lecture,
but you can see how difficult it is to figure things out.
That’s what Thomas Young was up against.
Now you can have more sympathy for the difficulty of his task.
But can we figure out something about the king?
The cartouche in front of him is easy for us, Ptolemy.
But that’s all it says.
It doesn’t even give a clue to which Ptolemy,
and there were more than a dozen.
The second cartouche will reveal his identity,
if we can read it.
Let’s take Thomas Young’s approach.
Let’s sound it out a letter at a time.
First letter, yes, basket, K. Next letter, yes, the double
reed.
Remember, this is a right to left reading text.
So we have K-Y.
Next is the folded cloth, giving us
K-Y-S. Now the lion’s tricky.
We know it was used for the L in Cleopatra and in Ptolemy.
However, it sometimes also doubled as an R.
And that’s what it’s doing here.
This gave all the decipherers problems for a while.
But they figured it out eventually.
But again, it wasn’t easy.
OK, we have K-Y-S-R. Then a bolt Z below, K-Y-S-R-Z.
Where does the name end?
How long do we have to keep going?
That’s another problem we have to deal with.
Well, the next group of four hieroglyphs is our answer.
Young saw this phrase, these four hieroglyphs,
over and over again, at the end of different names.
It means living forever.
But Young didn’t know this.
But he did deduce that it couldn’t be part of the name.
It must be something like a title or an epithet.
So we know where the name ends.
The entire name is K-Y-S-R-Z. Who is that?
We have to keep saying it aloud, trying to hear a name.
We know the queen is a Cleopatra.
Whose name, during that period of Egyptian history,
sounds like Kyserus, Kyserus, Caesar.
Yes, it’s the Roman Caesar.
But it isn’t Julius Caesar.
Cleopatra named their son Caesar after his father.
And that’s who we see here.
Cleopatra and her son, Caesar, shown as King of Egypt.
Later, he’ll be known as Caesarion, little Caesar.
So we are looking at Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemy
to rule Egypt.
But you can see how difficult it is
at the beginning of decipherment.
It wasn’t just, oh, the Rosetta Stone was found
and that did it.
It took 20 years.
Young was a pioneer and a very smart guy.
Young published his findings in the 1819 supplement
to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 years after the Rosetta
Stone was discovered.
He presented his partial alphabet
and also made some correct guesses--
and some incorrect ones too-- for groups of words.
But he never took it much further.
The problem was that he never gave up
his conviction that hieroglyphs were
ideograms, an idea that was firmly entrenched
for centuries.
You see, in the fifth century, a mysterious Egyptian
named Horapollo wrote Hieroglyphica, the earliest
work on hieroglyphs.
We know little about him.
Some scholars even think his book was written as late
as the 11th century.
But his name is a great combination
of Egyptian and Greek.
Hor-- the first part-- is the ancient Egyptian name
for Horus, the falcon god.
The Greeks added the U-S ending, Horus.
Apollo, of course is the Greek god of music.
So my bet is that he was an Egyptian who spoke Greek.
In his book, he explains how hieroglyphs work.
Even though he’s an Egyptian, living only a century
after the last hieroglyphic inscription was written,
he clearly doesn’t have a full grasp of how hieroglyphs work.
For example, he’s correct when he
says that the duck hieroglyph represents the word
"son," S-O-N, a male offspring.
But the explanation he offers is dead wrong.
The reason he gives is that the duck fights so fiercely
for its offspring that it’s associated with children.
Horapollo believes, incorrectly, that hieroglyphs are basically
picture writing, that the duck represents a duck.
And one of the properties of a duck,
fighting fiercely for its young, determines the meaning.
Actually, the duck phonetically represents a syllable, "sa."
It’s what we call a biliteral, a hieroglyph that represents
two sounds, the S and the A. We’ll
learn about biliterals soon.
There are even hieroglyphs that represent three sounds, one
after the other.
We’ll see one later today.
But now, back to our word, Sa.
The word Sa, in ancient Egyptian, meant son.
So the duck has phonetic value, not ideographic.
It’s not a picture.
This book, by Horapollo, presenting the big mistake,
threw off everyone who wanted to decipher hieroglyphs.
But it’s not all his fault. From the third century
on, many students of the occult believed
that there was a corpus of secret texts, written
by Hermes Trismegistus, thrice great Hermes.
Written in mystical hieroglyphs, these texts
were intended to be kept secret, revealed only to the initiated.
This belief in the essential secret nature of hieroglyphs
permeated the study of Egyptian texts
right up to the Renaissance.
No one imagined hieroglyphs were used to record
history or workmen’s wages.
They were sacred texts of Hermes Trismegistus.
The only problem was Hermes never existed.
The belief in Hermes also lasted into the Renaissance
and greatly influenced Athanasius Kircher’s attempt
to decipher.
Kircher has been called the last man who knew everything.
A Jesuit, he was by many accounts
a genius in several disciplines.
He built automata, studied volcanoes and botany,
was a master of a dozen languages,
and was considered by some to be the greatest
mind of the 17th century.
Others considered him a fraud.
For much of his life, he lived in Rome
and worked under the protection of the pope.
This was an era when obelisks that Roman emperors had brought
from Egypt were being rediscovered
beneath the streets of Rome and re-erected.
Kircher turned his extensive learning
to the task of translating the hieroglyphs on Rome’s obelisks.
The word obelisk is not Egyptian.
It’s Greek.
When the Greeks first entered Egypt and saw these tall pointy
things, they reminded them of meat skewers,
as in shish kebab.
That’s what obeliskus means, a meat skewer.
This was the ancient Egyptian word in hieroglyphs.
How is it pronounced?
That’s right, tekhen.
The last hieroglyph is the determinative.
It’s an obelisk on its base.
Notice the arrangement of the hieroglyphs.
It’s compact and pleasing.
It could have been written as individual hieroglyphs
in a row, like this.
But that’s not as elegant as grouping
the loaf and the placenta together, above the water sign.
Obelisks almost always came in pairs,
placed in front of temples, to proclaim who built the temple.
They never had anything mysterious or significant
inscribed on them.
Working in the hermetic tradition,
however, Kircher believed the hieroglyphs
were picture writing and contained
wisdom of the ancients.
He was guessing when he claimed that they
had religious significance.
He translated most of the obelisks in Rome.
But it was pure fantasy.
They merely contained the names and titles
of the pharaohs who erected them in Egypt.
Everyone trying to translate hieroglyphs
was still making the big mistake.
But we don’t have to.
So get on your scribes’ robes, it’s
time for hieroglyphs and real translations.
Last time, I gave you a few sentences
to translate from English to hieroglyphs.
Let’s see how you did.
The first sentence was, the woman does not know this man.
Start with the verb, khem, to not know.
Next, we put woman.
No need for the article the.
There’s no such thing in ancient Egyptian.
Remember, we don’t always need the stroke for the word woman.
It’s written both with and without it.
Now we add, this man.
Man is clearly masculine.
So we use the masculine form of this, pen.
Remember that this follows the noun.
And that’s it.
The woman does not know this man.
This would have been pronounced something like khem zet z pen.
Our next sentence was Re and Ptah
are together in this place.
Start with the verb, to be, yew.
That will give us the R part of the sentence.
Now we add the subjects, the gods Re and Ptah.
And we join them with our word for together with, heneh.
So now we have our verb and subjects.
Let’s add m, which is the owl.
Last, we have to say, this place, place is bew.
Since it doesn’t end in a T, it’s masculine.
We know we must use the masculine form of this,
which is pen.
And we remember that this follows the noun,
so the whole sentence reads, yew Re heneh Ptah m bew pen.
Good.
The next sentence was the man does not know another thing.
Well, we all know we start with a verb.
Next the subject, man.
We know there are no articles in ancient Egyptian,
no thes or as, so we just write man.
Another other comes next.
But we have to determine if thing is masculine or feminine,
so we can decide which another to use.
Well, khet is feminine.
It ends in a T. So we know we must use the feminine form
of another, khet.
This adjective, another, comes in front of the noun.
We have to remember that.
So the whole sentence is, khem z ket khet.
Good.
Our last sentence was the woman knows this man.
Start with the verb, rexh, to know.
Next a subject, woman.
Last, we need this man.
It’s obviously masculine, so for the this, we need pen,
and it goes after the noun.
And now we’ve got it, well done.
Let’s learn some more words, so we can say more complex things.
We want to get past see Spot run kind of sentences.
Let’s start with a few more verbs.
I’ll give you the hieroglyphs.
And you tell me how they’re pronounced.
It’s good practice.
Here’s one.
How is it pronounced?
That’s right, khed.
The boat doesn’t have a phonetic value.
It’s a determinative and helps us determine
the meaning of the word.
So we know it has something to do with boats.
The word means to fare downstream.
OK, next word.
How is it pronounced?
Yes, something like ha.
Again, the feet are a determinative, not pronounced,
but telling us the word has something to do with walking.
The word means to go down or descend.
Good.
Let me show you a similar word, not to be confused with ha.
How would you pronounce it?
Yes, hab.
It means to send.
So that I don’t confuse similar words,
I try to make up mnemonic devices to remember them.
So for hab, I try to think of sending my friend
Hobbs somewhere.
Whatever works for you.
Let’s learn another verb.
Here it is.
This is an unusual one.
Look at it.
You won’t be able to tell me how it’s pronounced,
because it’s tricky.
The ear hieroglyph-- that’s our first hieroglyph,
an ear-- is a triliteral, representing three sounds,
one after the other.
S DJ and M. It’s as if we wrote the folded cloth, serpent,
and owl, one after the other.
It’s pronounced sedjem.
And the word means to hear.
The owl is just a phonetic compliment,
a bonus to remind you how it’s pronounced.
To pronounce it, we put in the short e vowels,
but we’re not sure we’re right.
Remember, we have learned the alphabet,
hieroglyphs representing just one sound.
But there are other hieroglyphs that
represent two sounds, called biliterals, and some
that represent three sounds.
The ear hieroglyph is one of the triliterals.
When you add this word to your dictionary,
add it on the S page, since it begins with an S sound.
Now let’s add another word for boat, pronounced depet.
This is the kind of boat people used.
But let me show you another kind of boat, here it is.
How’s it pronounced?
Wia.
It’s a sacred boat, one in which a god
might ride across the sky.
We’re just beginning our study of middle Egyptian.
And already we have three words with the boat hieroglyph.
Boats were very important in ancient Egypt.
Besides walking, if you wanted to cover a long distance,
a boat was your only option.
So when the Egyptians imagined the journey to the next world,
it was in a sacred boat.
In temples, a statue of the god was
kept in a sealed room, called the holy of holies.
At festival times, the statue was placed inside a gilded wood
shrine and carried out to the temple courtyard for the people
to see.
That shrine was shaped like a boat, a wia, a sacred boat.
Carved on the walls of Carnac in Luxor Temple
are scenes of shaven headed priests
carrying the boat shrine.
Now, let me give you a strange looking word, it’s unusual.
It seems to have two determinatives-- a face
in profile and a papyrus roll.
Let’s pronounce it first and then figure out
what’s going on.
How would you pronounce it?
Reshwet, good, that’s right, reshwet.
That’s how it probably sounded.
The word means joy or gladness.
I think the profile is there, because you see
joy or gladness on the face.
The papyrus roll, which usually determines abstract things,
may be there because joy or gladness is an internal state.
That’s just a guess, pure surmise.
The ancient scribes never left us an explanation.
Let’s look at another word with a papyrus roll determinative.
It’s pronounced sekher and means plan or council.
Again, an abstract concept.
But not something you can touch.
Here’s our last word.
Can you tell me how the top hieroglyph is being used?
Is it a phonetic hieroglyph, a determinative, or an ideogram?
The stroke tells us it’s an ideogram.
It’s a picture of what it means.
Now the problem is what’s it a picture of?
The word means town.
What we are looking at is a crossroads.
And where two roads cross, you have a town.
We also know it’s feminine, because we have the loaf T.
From other contexts, I can tell you
it was pronounced niwit, niwit.
This is one that would be added to our dictionary in our N
page.
Because it begins with the sound N.
OK, that’s enough words for today.
I don’t want to overload you.
Be sure to add them to your personal dictionary,
in alphabetical order.
But you’re not getting off without homework.
Let me give you four sentences to translate into hieroglyphs.
First, Ptah goes down in another boat.
Be careful, this is just go down, not fare downstream.
Next, when this man fares downstream, the city is in joy.
Now let me tell you, there’s no word
for when in middle Egyptian.
So you don’t translate it, it’s understood.
Next, this woman listens to Ptah.
And last, a man is there in the city.
Next time, we’ll see more progress towards decipherment.
And we’ll also see how you did on the new sentences.
I’ll see you then.