Hieroglyphs 101 · Chapter 11

The stone that talked

In July 1799, soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rashid — Rosetta — pried out a broken slab of dark stone with three bands of writing on it. The top band was hieroglyphs, which no living person could read and hadn’t for well over a thousand years. The bottom band was Greek, which any educated European could read at sight. The middle was something in between. Every scholar in Europe understood within weeks what that meant: the same text, three times. A key, if anyone could turn it.

This chapter is the story of the turning — and you arrive at it armed, because the two signs that resisted longest are this chapter’s batch.

Decipherment’s workhorses

Before the famous rings, the lasso in its day job — on the tomb walls, where the cattle come with captions:

Egyptian tomb owners captioned their livestock the way we caption photographs, and herd after herd marches across the walls labeled young longhorn, young longhorn, young longhorn. Remember that homely little phrase: the sign in it is about to help crack the script.

The hunch about the rings

The Greek band of the Rosetta Stone is a decree honoring King Ptolemy V. The hieroglyphic band, whatever it said, kept repeating one group of signs inside a rope ring — and you know from chapter 05 what a cartouchethe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing wraps: a royal name. If the rings held “Ptolemy,” then a foreign king’s name — spellable only sound by sound, as chapter 05 explained — would hand over the value of every sign inside it. That was the hunch. Here is the payoff, kept exactly as promised:

Walk it: 𓊪Q3 · p · reed mat or stool p — 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread t — 𓍯V4 · wꜣ · lasso — wa the lasso, carrying o — 𓃭E23 · rw · recumbent lion — rw the lion, borrowed for L — 𓅓G17 · m · owl m — 𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed y — 𓋴S29 · s · folded cloth s. Ptolmys: Ptolemy. Seven sounds, one Greek king, and not a single box left. The chapter 05 exhibit is now simply a reading.

The cross-check: Cleopatra

A single name could be a lucky guess. Science wants a second sample — and on an obelisk from Philae, another ring supplied one. If the values from Ptolemy’s ring were real, they had to work in a different name, at different positions. Here is that ring, one sign still beyond this course:

Now do what the decipherers did. The lion 𓃭E23 · rw · recumbent lion — rw — L — is Ptolemy’s fourth sign; in Cleopatra it must come second. It does. The reed 𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed — third in Cleopatra, sixth (doubled) in Ptolemy. The lasso 𓍯V4 · wꜣ · lasso — wa — O in both, third and fourth. The mat 𓊪Q3 · p · reed mat or stool — P — first in Ptolemy, fifth in Cleopatra. Sign after sign lands exactly where the Greek spelling demands. One wobble: Cleopatra’s T is written with the hand 𓂧D46 · d · hand, which usually carries d — the two sounds sat close enough for scribes to swap, and even that wobble taught the decipherers something true about how the script breathed. Two names, one consistent alphabet: the rings were readable, and therefore everything was.

Which way does a line run?

One more tool the decipherers needed, and so do you. This course prints every reading left-to-right, and told you so in chapter 01 — but real walls run whichever way the architecture wanted, and half the time that is right-to-left. The rule is a compass, and the animals are the needle:

The leap: Ramses

The rings proved the alphabet worked for foreign names. The question that kept the field awake was whether the sound-signs reached further — into Egyptian itself. In 1822 Champollion, who had taught himself Coptic (Egyptian’s great-grandchild, still spoken in church) precisely for this moment, looked at a cartouchethe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing copied from a temple at Abu Simbel:

He knew 𓇳N5 · rꜥ · sun disc; the god Ra from every temple: Ra, the sun. He knew ms from the Coptic word for “born.” He knew 𓋴S29 · s · folded cloth from the rings. Ra-mes-es — “Ra bore him” — a name every classicist knew from the Greek historians: Ramses. The sound-signs were not a special trick for foreigners; they were the script’s own machinery, and Egyptian royal names had been sentences all along, just like Meni’s neighbors in chapter 07. Champollion ran to his brother’s office, announced “Je tiens l’affaire!” — I’ve got it — and fainted. He was out for five days. When he woke, everything you have done in this course had become possible.¹

Drill before you go on

1. Draw 𓃭E23 · rw · recumbent lion — rw and 𓍯V4 · wꜣ · lasso — wa from memory; say rw, wꜣ.
2. Read Ptolemy’s cartouchethe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing aloud, sign by sign, without the gloss. You have waited six chapters to do this.
3. In Cleopatra’s ring, point to the three signs that also appear in Ptolemy’s, and say which position each takes in both.
4. State the compass rule in one sentence, and say which way this course prints its lines.
5. Why did Ramses’s name settle the whole argument? One sentence.

Next: the Reference — every sign you own, in one table, and where to go from here.