Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (review)

Academic folk history traces the origins of the modern field of linguistics to Sir William Jones’s speculations about the relation between Sanskrit and the European classical languages, the bicentennial of which we recently observed. But for the rest of the world, the great linguistic discovery of that time, and indeed of the last two hundred years, was Champollion’s decipherment in 1822 of the Rosetta stone, dug up by Napoleon’s soldiers in 1799 and housed since 1802 in the British Museum in London (along with the rest of the many Egyptian antiquities collected by the French expedition and surrendered to the British).

To observe the bicentennial of the discovery of the stone, the British Museum mounted a special exhibition, for which this eponymous volume written by the curator of the exhibition is a selective catalog, accompanied by a narrative. The exhibition contained more than two hundred items (most of them from the British Museum, an indicator of the depth of that museum’s Egyptological collection), half of which are catalogued in the core chapter of the book, Ch. 3, ‘Towards reading a cultural code: The uses of writing in Ancient Egypt’ (70–175). The entire book is also copiously illustrated with 75 additional figures (again drawn largely from the museum’s collection). Of the remaining chapters, Ch. 1, ‘Deciphering the Rosetta stone’ (12–45), and Ch. 2, ‘Reading a text: The Egyptian scripts of the Rosetta stone’ (46–69), are fairly standard introductions to their respective topics. Ch. 4, ‘The future: Further codes to crack’ (176–197), draws connections between Egyptology and more modern literary and linguistic theory, somewhat prophetically traces the origin of the alphabet directly to Egypt (late last year, very early examples of the Semitic alphabet were discovered in the south of Egypt, predating the earliest known Sinaitic inscriptions by several centuries), passes quickly over several undeciphered scripts, and closes with a section on the difference between decipherment and cryptanalysis, written by ‘a couple made up of an Egyptologist and a cryptographer’!

The text closes with an appendix consisting of a new translation of the Demotic text of the Memphis decree on the Rosetta stone (readers able to conjure up a picture of the stone will remember that the Demotic text, which is sandwiched between the Hieroglyphic and the Greek versions, is the most complete of the three). Even now, one is struck by the mundaneness of the text. It begins with a long formal encomium to the king of the time, followed by a hodge-podge list of his good deeds (tax relief, public works, military exploits, defeat of foreign invaders, and suppression of local rebellions), and goes on to declare that the priests will erect a statue of the king in every temple of Egypt and pay elaborate service to the statues in his honor. The prescribed service is given in great detail, and the text closes self-referentially with the declaration that the decree should be ‘written on a stela of hard stone, in sacred writing, document writing, and Greek writing, and it should be set up in the first-class temples, the second-class temples, and the third-class temples, next to the statue of the King, living forever’. This Ozymandian closure reminds us both of how different the contents of these texts turned out to be from the mysteries that they were believed to hold even in late Classical times and of how puzzling they must always remain to us, who can never be Ancient Egyptians.

All in all, this volume is a wonderful addition to the growing list of books on ancient scripts that the British Museum and the University of California Press have put out over the last decade or so. It is also a refreshing reminder that the British tradition of superb popular scholarship is still alive and well.