Cracking the Rosetta code: How a black slab of stone unlocked a world to an ancient Egyptian civilization 

A new British Museum exhibition marks 200 years since scholars cracked the code of the Rosetta Stone, pictured. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
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Updated 14 October 2022
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Cracking the Rosetta code: How a black slab of stone unlocked a world to an ancient Egyptian civilization 

  • For centuries, ancient Egypt was shrouded in darkness until a discovery of a slab of stone that put Egyptologists to the test
  • The 3,000-year-old Rosetta Stone, engraved in three different languages, would prove to be the key to understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs

LONDON: From a military perspective, the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, an attempt to disrupt British trade and influence in North Africa and India, was a complete failure. For the world’s understanding of 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian history, however, it would prove to be an accidental triumph.

An army of 50,000 men under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte landed at Alexandria on July 2, 1798, and over the next three years there were a series of victories, and the occasional defeat, for the French troops in Egypt and Syria.

But after the British navy sank Napoleon’s fleet in Aboukir Bay at the Battle of the Nile on July 25, 1799, the dwindling, disease-ravaged French army, harried by Ottoman and British forces, found itself trapped in a hostile, alien land. With no way out, and no chance of reinforcement, the end was inevitable.

Napoleon knew this, and on the night of Aug. 22, 1799, he abandoned his troops and slipped back to Paris and his ultimate destiny — in 1804, he would be crowned emperor of France.

The remains of his army in Egypt clung on, even after Napoleon’s successor as commander was assassinated, until it finally surrendered to the British at Alexandria on Sept. 2, 1801.

As part of the expedition, Napoleon had ordered the wholesale looting of antiquities to be taken back to France. But, after the French surrender, most of these fell into the hands of the British. Among the spoils shipped back to the British Museum was a block of polished stone engraved with writing in three different languages — ancient Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Discovered in July 1799 by a French army engineer who had been strengthening the defenses of a captured 15th-century Ottoman fort near Rosetta on the west bank of the Nile, the object became known as the Rosetta Stone.




Detail of The Book of the Dead of Queen Nedjmet, papyrus, Egypt, 1070 BC, 21st Dynasty. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

It would prove to be the key to understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Although many European scholars were fluent in ancient Greek, it would be more than two decades before they were able to crack the Rosetta code. When they did, it was a landmark moment in Egyptology, which the British Museum is celebrating this month with a major new exhibition that brings together a collection of more than 240 objects, including the Rosetta Stone.

The exhibition, “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt,” coincides with the 200th anniversary of the final breakthrough by French philologist and orientalist Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822.

“Deciphering the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone unlocked 3,000 years of Egyptian history,” Ilona Regulski, curator of Egyptian written culture at the British Museum, told Arab News.

“Until then, nobody knew how far back the ancient Egyptian civilization went, or how long it lasted. But after his breakthrough, Champollion was able to translate the names of kings and establish a royal chronology which went back much farther in time than anyone had previously realized. 

“Very soon, there also came the understanding that this was a complex civilization that had relationships with its neighbors, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, and step by step we came to understand the society better.

“From the Greek historians, who reported some practices that they saw, we knew that the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. But we didn’t really understand how these people lived and experienced their world.”




Temple lintel of King Amenemhat III, Hawara, Egypt, 12th Dynasty, 1855–08 BC. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

Cracking the Rosetta code was a complex business that tested the minds of European academics. Although the stone featured three translations of the same decree, they were not alike word for word.

“Champollion and others started by looking at the Greek text and identifying words that appeared often, for example, the word for temple, or the title basileus (a term for monarch),” said Regulski. “They looked at the demotic text to see if there was a cluster of signs that appeared more or less in the same place.”

It was a reasonable start, but a process frustrated by the fact, not initially appreciated, that neither ancient Egyptian nor demotic were alphabet-based scripts, and that any one word could be spelled in many different ways in the same document.

Eventually, a sign list, a kind of ancient Egyptian dictionary, was created, “but it was not enough to understand the entire text, or to use it to read other inscribed objects,” said Regulski.

It was Champollion who finally figured out that hieroglyphics was a hybrid system.

“There are alphabetic signs, but also single signs that represent two or three letters, or even entire words,” said Regulski. “And some are silent signs, what we call ‘determinatives’ in Egyptology. You don’t read them in any way, but they indicate the meaning of the preceding word, telling you whether it’s a verb or a noun.”

Basically, hieroglyphics “appears to be a very simple, symbol-based language, but it’s much more complicated than that, and much more complex than an alphabetic script, and that took a long time to figure out.”




Temple lintel of King Amenemhat III, Hawara, Egypt, 12th Dynasty, 1855–08 BC. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

The script on the Rosetta Stone turned out to be a decree written in 196 B.C. by priests at Memphis, recognizing the authority of the Ptolemaic pharaoh Ptolemy V. It would have been written originally on papyrus, with copies distributed around the kingdom so the text could be engraved on stone slabs, or “stelae,” for display in temples throughout Egypt.

Over the following decades, nine other partial copies of the decree would be discovered at sites across Egypt. But the Rosetta Stone is the most complete and, without it, for example “the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun,” excavated by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, “would have looked very different,” said Regulski.

“It would have been difficult for Carter to identify the king, which is quite crucial, and his place in the context of the chronology of the 18th dynasty. We would just have a beautiful tomb with beautiful things.”

By the standards of ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone is not that ancient. “For us as Egyptologists,” said Regulski, “the stone, from about 200 B.C., comes very late in the story of hieroglyphics, a writing system that first came into use in about 3250 B.C.”

And in 200 B.C., hieroglyphics were already on the way out.

“The first really important change in Egypt was the use of Greek as the administrative language,” said Regulski.

“When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C., people were already speaking Greek; the language was already circulating from the eighth century onwards, because of trade and because there were lots of Greek mercenaries who fought in the Egyptian army and settled in the country.

“But from Alexander the Great onward, and especially in the Ptolemaic periods, Greek became the language of administration and slowly pushed Egyptian out.”




Clockwise from left: Statue of a scribe, limestone, Egypt, 6th Dynasty. (Musée du Louvre); a casket with hieroglyphs on its side (British Museum); a Mummy bandage of Aberuai, linen, Saqqara, Egypt, Ptolemaic period. (Musée du Louvre). 

Regardless of the historical context of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and its seizure by the British, “for the field of Egyptology, and for Egypt, it is definitely something to celebrate,” said Regulski.

“Today, there are many Egyptologists in the world, including our colleagues in Egypt, and we all work together, a huge community trying to refine our knowledge of ancient Egypt, which all came out of this one venture.”

Regulski, who spent two years working alongside Egyptian colleagues at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, could not be drawn on the vexed subject of whether the Rosetta Stone should be returned to its country of origin.

More than 100,000 artifacts from Egypt’s rich past will be housed in the Grand Egyptian Museum, currently nearing completion at a site west of Cairo, close to the Giza pyramids.

Among them will be the 5,400 treasures entombed with Tutankhamun more than 3,300 years ago, including his iconic death mask, which, after decades of touring the world, will finally come to rest where they belong.

However, the Rosetta Stone, the key to understanding it all, will remain in Britain.

The British general who accompanied the stone back to Britain in 1801 after it was taken from the French, chose to see it and 20 other pieces not as loot, but as “a proud trophy of the arms of Britain — not plundered from defenseless inhabitants, but honorably acquired by the fortune of war.”

The British Museum exhibition will feature the French capitulation document, on loan from the UK’s National Archives and displayed for the first time. This, said a spokesperson for the British Museum, is “the legal agreement which included the transfer of the Rosetta Stone to Britain ... as a diplomatic gift ... signed by all parties; representatives of the Egyptian, French and British governments.”




Cartonnage and mummy of the lady Baketenhor. (Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

Today, an Egyptian government might justifiably take issue with the description of an officer of the Ottoman army as a rightful custodian of Egyptian heritage. 

Certainly, at the time, no thought was given to whether the Rosetta Stone and other antiquities ought to remain in Egypt, a question that is becoming ever more acute today, in an era when pressure is mounting on Western institutions such as the British Museum to return the spoils of imperial wars and adventures.

“The only thing I would say is that having worked closely with Egyptian curators at the museum, it’s not a priority for many of them,” said Regulski. “I find it a bit sad that our relationship is framed in this way, about giving back objects or not, because our relationship with our Egyptian colleagues is about so much more than which individual objects went to this place, or that.

“It’s about celebrating ancient Egypt, and there is still so much to do in Egypt, so much to learn, to research and collaborate on, and that is the positive thing to focus on.”

The public fascination with ancient Egypt owes its origins to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the single most visited object in the British Museum, and “to a culture that left behind such a well-preserved, monumental testament to its existence that also has such a powerful visual appeal, which you don’t have in some other ancient cultures.

“I think the general visitor to a museum is drawn to this highly visual, artistic culture, including the writing system itself. If you compare it with cuneiform, for example, you’re going to be drawn more to hieroglyphics, because it’s so beautiful, so visually appealing. I think that’s what hooks people and encourages them to learn more about the culture.”

Certainly, the British Museum expects the exhibition, which will chart the journey to decipher hieroglyphs, from initial efforts by medieval Arab travelers and Renaissance scholars, through to Champollion’s triumph in 1822, to be one of its most popular to date. 

‘Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt,’ is at the British Museum from Oct. 13, 2022 to Feb. 19, 2023.

 


Russian missile attack kills Ukrainian servicemen in training

Updated 4 min 13 sec ago
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Russian missile attack kills Ukrainian servicemen in training

  • Moscow’s forces have inflicted casualties in attacks on Ukrainian military educational institutions and various formal outdoor gatherings

KYIV: A Russian missile attack on a Ukrainian military shooting range killed six servicemen and wounded at least 10 more during training on Tuesday, Ukraine’s national guard said on Wednesday, adding that the commander of the unit had been suspended.
Russia’s defense ministry had said on Tuesday that the missile attack on the training camp in the Sumy region in northeastern Ukraine near the Russian border killed up to 70 Ukrainian service members, including 20 instructors.
The Ukrainian national guard statement said an internal investigation was underway and the necessary information was shared with law enforcement agencies.
“The investigation will provide a legal assessment of the actions of all persons who made the relevant decisions,” it said about the attack on the military unit’s shooting range.
After previous deadly strikes on military training camps, Ukraine launched investigations into possible negligence.
During more than three years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Moscow’s forces have inflicted casualties in attacks on Ukrainian military educational institutions and various formal outdoor gatherings.


Four children killed in school bus attack in southwestern Pakistan: government officials

Updated 21 May 2025
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Four children killed in school bus attack in southwestern Pakistan: government officials

  • At least four children were killed on Wednesday and over 30 wounded in a suspected suicide bombing that targeted a bus carrying students from a military run school in southwestern Pakistan, officials

QUETTA: At least four children were killed on Wednesday and over 30 wounded in a suspected suicide bombing that targeted a bus carrying students from a military run school in southwestern Pakistan, officials said.
“A bus carrying children of the APS (Army Public School) was targeted with a bomb, the nature of which is still being determined,” Yasir Iqbal Dashti, a senior local government official in Khuzdar district of Balochistan province, told AFP.
“The initial probe suggests it was a suicide bombing,” he added.
A senior police official confirmed the death toll to AFP on condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to speak to the media, adding that it could rise.
The school caters to the children of army personnel and civilians living in the area.
In 2014, the Army Public School in Peshawar in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province was attacked by gunmen who killed more than 150 people — mostly students.
The horrific attack sparked a massive crackdown against militancy that had thrived for years in the border regions.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi offered his “heartfelt sympathy” to the families of the victims, adding that “beasts who target innocent children deserve no mercy.”


Flood victims stranded on roofs as downpours lash eastern Australia

Updated 21 May 2025
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Flood victims stranded on roofs as downpours lash eastern Australia

  • Storms have already dumped more than four months of rain in just two days in parts of New South Wales
  • Authorities say that water levels of a river in Taree surged past a previous record in 1929

SYDNEY: Fast-moving floodwaters rose Wednesday in eastern Australia, inundating homes and leaving residents stranded on their roofs overnight, as authorities warned more rain was expected in coming days.
Storms have already dumped more than four months of rain in just two days in parts of New South Wales, engulfing homes, businesses and roads in muddy waters, authorities said.
“We have a situation where the rain has been falling quite heavily and hard and it has not been moving away. Part of that is because the ground is saturated and the rivers are swollen,” the state’s emergency minister Jihad Dib told reporters.
Taree, about 300 kilometers (180 miles) north of Sydney, is a key area of concern for emergency services after 415 millimeters (16.34 inches) of rain lashed the town since Monday – more than four times the mean monthly rainfall for May.
Authorities said that water levels of a river in Taree surged past a previous record in 1929, reaching 6.3 meters (20.6 feet) on Wednesday.
The rising floodwaters left locals stuck on roofs overnight, with rescuers unable to reach them due to the bad weather.
Taree resident Holly Pillotto, who was among those stranded on an upper level of her home, said she was desperate for assistance as floodwaters continued to rise.
“Our neighbors on the back verandah here are also stranded,” she told Australia’s Channel Nine. “It’s a really dangerous spot to be.”
Dib said that emergency services were “throwing everything we have into” reaching those affected.
State Emergency Service Chief Superintendent Dallas Byrnes said the situation was “incredibly dynamic and escalating,” with more than 150 flood rescues conducted overnight.
“We’ve got a lot of people getting rescued from rooftops and from upper levels of houses,” Byrnes told the national broadcaster ABC.
However, he warned that “conditions are quite treacherous and it may be that those aviation assets are unable to fly throughout the day.”
The agency said that about 16,000 people, or 7,400 dwellings, would remain isolated until at least Thursday.
More heavy rain is expected in the coming 48 hours – with some locations to receive 200 millimeters (7.87 inches) – before conditions begin to ease, authorities said Wednesday.
Scientists have warned that heatwaves and other extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more intense as global temperatures rise because of climate change.


WHO says vaccine-derived poliovirus detected in Papua New Guinea

Updated 21 May 2025
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WHO says vaccine-derived poliovirus detected in Papua New Guinea

  • Wild polio is only endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan but vaccine-derived polio continues to cause outbreaks in wider range of countries
  • This is first polio outbreak in Papua New Guinea since 2018 when an outbreak was reported in the same area as the new detections, Lae city

The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) had been detected in stool specimens of two healthy children in Papua New Guinea on May 9.

The detection of wild poliovirus or vaccine-derived poliovirus, including from samples taken from healthy children, is considered a serious public health event, WHO said in a statement.

It added that the detection of circulating type 2 poliovirus was classified as a “polio outbreak.”

Wild polio is only endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but vaccine-derived polio continues to cause outbreaks in a wider range of countries. For example, this year, countries including Nigeria and Ethiopia, among others, have reported tens of cases of paralysis caused by polio.

This is the first polio outbreak in Papua New Guinea since 2018, when an outbreak was reported in the same area as the new detections, Lae city in Morobe province.

Vaccination protects against all forms of polio, but coverage rates in Papua New Guinea are only around 44 percent for the third dose needed for protection, the WHO said. Efforts are now underway to detect further transmission and boost vaccination coverage in the affected area.

Poliomyelitis, which is spread mainly through the faecal-oral route, is a highly infectious virus that can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis and death in young children, with those under 2 years old most at risk. In nearly all cases it has no symptoms, making it hard to detect. 


US expects Russia offer soon as Zelensky sounds warning

Updated 21 May 2025
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US expects Russia offer soon as Zelensky sounds warning

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday he expected Russia to present a Ukraine ceasefire outline within days that will show if it is serious, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Moscow of buying time.
President Donald Trump spoke separately by telephone on Monday to Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, after Russian and Ukrainian officials met in Istanbul on Friday for their first direct talks on the conflict in three years.
Putin has consistently rejected proposals for a 30-day truce put forward by Kyiv and its Western allies.
But Rubio said that Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicated they would present their own terms “maybe in a number of days, maybe this week hopefully.”
The Russians will offer “just broad terms that would allow us to move toward a ceasefire, and that ceasefire would then allow us to enter into detailed negotiations to bring about an end of the conflict,” Rubio said.
He said that the presentation will “tell us a lot about their true intentions.”
“If it’s a term sheet that’s realistic and you can work off of it, that’s one thing. If it makes demands that we know are unrealistic, I think that will be indicative.”
Putin after Trump’s call said he was ready to work with Ukraine on a “memorandum” outlining a possible roadmap and different positions on ending the war.
And Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Tuesday said that Pope Leo XIV was willing “to host upcoming discussions between the parties at the Vatican,” according to her office.
Rubio insisted to critical lawmakers that Putin “hasn’t gotten a single concession” from Trump. But Russia has also not indicated any new flexibility since Trump took office in January with vows to end the war through dialogue.
“It is obvious that Russia is trying to buy time in order to continue its war and occupation,” Zelensky said in a post on social media.
Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Rubio that Putin’s refusal to go to Istanbul despite the stated willingness of both Zelensky and Trump to meet showed “he believes it’s in Russia’s interest to carry out this war as long as possible.”
The European Union formally on Tuesday adopted its 17th round of sanctions on Moscow, targeting 200 vessels of Russia’s so-called shadow maritime fleet.
Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund and lead economic negotiator with Washington, attacked the move, saying: “Western politicians and the media are making titanic efforts to disrupt the constructive dialogue between Russia and the United States.”
Rubio said that Trump for now opposed new sanctions for fear that Russia would no longer come to the table.
Moscow appears confident, with its troops advancing on the battlefield and Trump ending Western isolation of the Kremlin.
The memorandum mentioned by Putin “buys time for Russia,” Russian political analyst Konstantin Kalachev said.
“The cessation of hostilities is not a condition for it, which means that Russia can continue its offensive,” he added.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and has since destroyed swathes of the country’s east, killed tens of thousands and now controls around one-fifth of its territory.
People who spoke to AFP both in Kyiv and Moscow were skeptical about peace prospects and thought the Putin-Trump call had not brought them closer.
“I never had any faith in him and now I have none at all,” retired teacher Victoria Kyseliova said in Kyiv, when asked if she was losing confidence in Trump.
Vitaliy, a 53-year-old engineer from Kyiv, said Trump was no “messiah” and that his flurry of diplomacy has changed little.
Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said Trump’s latest calls had only added to the uncertainty.
“This conversation not only failed to clarify the future of the negotiations but further confused the situation,” he said.
He said Trump had fallen for Putin’s tactics of trying to use talks “as a cover to continue and intensify the war.”
In Moscow, there was defiance and confidence.
“I believe that we don’t need these negotiations. We will win anyway,” said Marina, a 70-year-old former engineer.