Others ventured up similarly blind alleys, stumped by symbols that offered no clues about whether they were to be read phonetically, or stood for ideas. A hawk must symbolize a god, he posited, because birds fly on a slant and “only the hawk flies straight upward.” A hare connotes “open” because it seemed never to shut its eyes. Horapallo, a fifth-century Egyptian priest, believed that each pictograph had a deep hidden meaning, and he engaged in wild stabs in the dark to figure out what that was. Like Fox, Dolnick exuberantly captures the frustrations and triumphs of scholars as they puzzle out the meaning of long-dead runes, “seduced by tantalizing clues and then careening into dead ends and losing hope, but then spotting new markers and dashing off jubilantly once more.” With its thrilling dissection of the decoding process, it calls to mind Margalit Fox’s “ The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code” (2013), about three scholars who deciphered Linear B, the 3,400-year-old script excavated from the ruins of Crete’s Minoan civilization. A former science writer for The Boston Globe and the author of books about Isaac Newton and a Dutch art forger who duped the Nazis, Dolnick here conjures up another intricate intellectual caper. The discovery of the slab, called the Rosetta Stone after the town in which it was found, reignited the ultimate linguistic challenge: deciphering the symbols of the Pharaohs.Įdward Dolnick’s “The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone” is an engrossing account of the 20-year competition that followed. All three were dead languages, but the Greek alphabet was still in use.
And the three bands of text - classical Greek, hieroglyphs and an Egyptian shorthand called Demotic - were intended to proclaim the monarch’s achievements in multiple tongues to the peoples of the empire. The nearly one-ton stela, experts determined, had come from a temple dedicated to the Greek-Egyptian King Ptolemy V in 196 B.C. Pierre-François Bouchard, the officer in charge, sensed its significance and turned it over to scholars for analysis. Amid a pile of rubble being used for a renovation project, he noticed a 4-foot-by-3-foot granite slab, covered on one side with intricate inscriptions. On a steamy day in July 1799, a member of a French military work detail at a tumbledown fort in the Nile Delta made an unusual discovery. THE WRITING OF THE GODS The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone By Edward Dolnick
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