[ Music ]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[ Music ]
This earth that we live on, walk on, feed on, and dream on, this earth with all its heavy elements
is the storehouse of our cultural memory.
The fossil record of the human story has been preserved in earth and matter like clay, bronze
or stone, and most of what has survived across the ages did so because it found its way into the earth's humus.
The earth is our ultimate burial ground.
It is what civilizations sink into when they die.
If we have a historical memory, it is thanks in large part to this terrestrial, receptacle that
and serves fragments of the past, even as it covers up all traces of them.
The modern discipline of archaeology consists essentially of digging into the earth and bringing
to light cultural deposits that have been buried there either by accident or by design.
Archaeology is at bottom, geology.
Stay tuned in title opinions on the Rosetta Stone coming up.
[ Music ]
We haven't done nearly enough shows about archaeology on entitled opinions, but we're going to correct that,
beginning with our show today about the Rosetta Stone.
I have with me in the studio my colleague Patrick Hunt, Patrick has served as the director of the Stanford Alpine Archaeological
Projects in 1994.
He also directs the National Geographic Society's Hannibal Expedition.
He has been elected fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London.
He has written over 100 articles, has broken over 20 bones in falls from stone monuments during field work,
or so I learn from the bio in the book of his that we'll be talking about today.
And there's a lot more to his bio that will post on the entitled opinions website.
But more importantly for our purposes today, Patrick has recently published a book with the plume division of Penguin
Books called Ten Discoveries that rewrote history.
At first I thought we would do a show that touched on all ten of these discoveries, but superficiality is not our MO on entitled
opinions, so we decided to focus most of our attention today on only one of these discoveries, namely the Rosetta Stone.
But before we get down into the trenches, let me welcome my guest Patrick to the show, Patrick,
it's great that you could join us today.
Thank you Robert, it's a pleasure and an honor.
Thank you. Now before we talk about the Rosetta Stone, I'd like to read aloud for our listeners the chapter titles of your book in order
and ask you to say something about this list of top ten discoveries in the history of archaeology.
So the first one indeed is the Rosetta Stone, the key to Egyptian history, chapter two is Troy, the key to Homer and Greek history,
three,
Nine of us Assyrian library, the key to Mesopotamia,
four King Tut's tomb, the key to Egypt's God Kings,
five Machu Picchu, the key to Inca architecture, six Pompeii, the key to Roman life,
seven Dead Sea Scrolls, the key to biblical research, eight Thera, the key to the Aegean Bronze Age, nine,
The Old Divide Georg, the key to human evolution, and ten, the tomb of ten thousand warriors, the key to imperial China.
And that sounds like we have a lot of potential future shows in waiting, but could you tell us a little bit about how you narrow down your top ten
10-picks, Patrick? Yes Robert, it's an interesting idea that anyone could choose ten out of the hundreds of possible candidates.
What seems to be the common thread through here is that if you ask archaeologists who work on global contexts across five or six continents, different regions,
they might be hard pressed to create a list, but I found from my own experience when I've asked colleagues, places in the looves where the British Museum or the Met or places like that, world-class museums,
in looking at their collections, how would they assess or rate the most important sites, the weight of the discovery, how much it affected our interpretations of history, our reconstructions of the past.
Then there's a sort of a subplot here. One of the things that ties these ten together is that, unusually so for an archaeologist, I've been very fortunate to work on these places, these sites, all ten of them, all ten of these objects, or the cultures.
That is unusual because what started out for me as a material archaeologist was that while most archaeologists isolate or work on one culture, one time period, one material, I worked first on one material, stone, and that took me around the world for my PhD research before and since.
So it was sort of a natural that if I could find ten sites, ten places, major places that were also in my own sort of experience that I'd worked on these materials or these objects or worked in these places.
I could, I pulled together a book, it had to be something that I was familiar with in terms of the whole story, and it's ambitious to try to do this, even a little bit who brisket to think that you could choose a top ten list.
I was thinking a lot about stone for today's show, not just because we're going to talk about the Rosetta Stone, but it struck me again also I was thinking of Keats of all people who's tombstone in Rome, and Protestant cemetery, now called the non-Catholic cemetery of Rome, where he says,
He realized one whose name was written in water, because he thought that he was dying too young to actually have inscribed his name in stone, namely in the hard core memory of British poetry.
And this medium in which so much is preserved stone or clay, then it becomes papyrus and there's a whole history of this.
But I was thinking about how impossible it is for me to even find the technology that will read discs that I was using in my computer in the 80s.
And we think that we have this huge archive of knowledge that is being preserved forever in digital form, but every decade it seems like if you don't have that program, we are just not going to be able to decode what was done in 50 years from now.
I was going to be like hieroglyphs, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs compared to what that was in the period that we're going to be talking about when this Rosetta Stone was discovered.
So, stone, if I had to be an archaeologist, I would want to work in stone too.
That's very prescient of you to note that because the ephemerality of materials, there's a funny book written in the last century called the Motel of the Mysteries and how archaeologists in the somewhat near future, a few hundred years from now, try to interpret things.
For example, they pick up a toilet seat and think it's some kind of mesmerizing pectoral jewelry.
You could say the same thing if our culture crashed and people thought CD discs with their shimmering iridescence were jewelry also because they couldn't access the data.
And I think it's interesting too that the term stone age is a bit of a misnomer because even though it's sensible to create these ideas of stone age, bronze age, or copper age bronze age, iron age, and if we're now in an age, the age of plastic or whatever, the problem is that people for at least a hundred thousand years have been using also organic materials would bone textile skins.
But those things don't survive because they're organic, they decompose and usually only the stone is left.
Exactly.
So when it comes to the stone, it's something where something can be inscribed and it can last a very long time.
It's not, there's nothing eternal. It also has its own age, but it just ages at a much slower rate than other things.
And here what we want to talk about is the first chapter of your book about the Rosetta stone, which is almost the archetype of a place of inscription because you have, you'll give us a detail so it, but you have a text which is inscribed in three different
alphabets or at languages and it enabled the Europeans to finally understand the Egyptian hieroglyphic language after a long, kind of intense period of decodification we want to get into the details of that.
So if we can jump right into that first chapter of your book there on the Rosetta stone,
first thing, why is it called the Rosetta stone?
That's because it was found in a branch of the Nile that an Arabic would be called al-Rashid.
Al-Rashid.
It's the branch that runs fairly close to the west, to Alexandria.
And over time it's been given that European name Rosetta.
And this stone, can you just reconstruct a little bit about how it was discovered and what its fate had been?
And I gather from reading you that it was actually inscribed somewhere about 200 years BC.
Yes, 196 BC.
Under Ptolemy V. And Ptolemy V had been preceded by his father, whose death was not a good thing.
It was probably an assassination.
It was elimination.
And there was political instability.
And Ptolemy V's reign was very, shall we say, at least tentative.
And no one knew for sure if he was going to make it.
And he was just a boy king.
And advisors and so on.
There's a lot of chaos in the regime.
So there was a stone made.
And it wasn't the only stone made.
It's just the copy that it survived and even that in fragment form.
But there was now a threat.
The British were coming and the French had already occupied Egypt under Napoleon.
They'd sent their expeditionary forces there and they had sort of what we could call one of the world's first scientific expeditions.
Historians, geographers, botanists, zoologists.
Everyone went to Egypt because it was still largely unknown.
And the exploration of Europe, the ruins of Greece and Rome had already been in many times in ways pilfered by Europeans.
The kings and queens and nobles, the aristocrats of Europe had descended on Italy and Greece.
And taken much.
You could look at the Elgin marbles.
You could look at all kinds of examples of that.
But Egypt was still pretty much unclaimed.
And it was exotic.
Napoleon was looking at that as his own personal feftum.
So he sent his forces there.
But they knew the Brits were coming.
The Brits had their eyes on Egypt.
And of course, Nelson's forces were assembling.
There was going to be a blockade in the Nile.
And it was building.
The tension was building.
So Napoleon, now who's going back and forth to France, has commanded his engineers to rebuild a fort there on the Nile on the Alreshead branch.
The fort was Fort St. Julian.
So a lieutenant, Boucher, one of the engineering officers, was having work crews, prize out stones from the quays from the warves.
Some of them underwater, some of them in berms of dirt and earth.
And they'd been in there for probably well night, 2000 years, maybe even longer.
And so stones weren't in their original placements.
They were already now in secondary or tertiary placements.
And stones moved around.
So Boucher had his workforce pulling out these stones and they would fall out in the dust.
And suddenly, here in 1799, as far as we can tell, this stone falls out.
When the dust settles, Boucher looks at it.
And he's amazed.
Because while some of the stones they had prized out and were rebuilding of the fort had bits of hieroglyphs on them,
this was a long text. And it wasn't just one text.
It was three separate texts.
The top text was hieroglyph.
The second text looked like sort of a cursive shorthand type.
And the third text, this is what caught Boucher's attention.
It was in Greek.
And he knew it was Greek because as an engineer, he knew the language of mathematics and could recognize some of the Greek letters.
Deltas and lambdas and things like that.
So he saw that it was a text. And you can imagine his amazement because a bright man, a good engineer, deductive person,
he asked this question, "I wonder with this long text, the longest text that had been seen before, all in one stone."
He asked, "I wonder if it says the same thing in three languages."
And that would have been extraordinary because for a while, at least a few centuries, people had been intrigued by the hieroglyphic language and had been trying to decode it.
And I did a show on Kierkerer, you know, at the 17th.
Yes, at the New Adamaceous Kierkerer.
And then Kierkerer, who had some wild attempts to theories of transcription.
And of course, the speculation had been rife, but this would have been, yeah, I can appreciate Bruce Shays.
And I think you mentioned in your book that it's just a happy coincidence that that stone happened to land face up rather than face down, had it landed face down.
Who knows?
Exactly.
And there were 50 probabilities and knowing that nobody knew how to read hieroglyphs at this point.
1799, there were a lot of theories like Athanasius Kierkerer's out there.
Many people took their best shots at it, but whether they were linguists or not, there was no key.
There was no template.
And this was the first and only one.
Yes.
For the time.
Now, we have a few others that have turned out there in the Museo Ejitzio in Torino.
There is a good example, but found later and now in the Sheper-Rely collection there.
So what happens after the stone is discovered in Boucher, it appreciates the importance of it as a discovery.
He knew it meant something.
And you're absolutely right.
The import of this to him, he knew that it meant something more to scholars.
So he put it into a cart and it went all the way across bouncing over those roads and through the pirates' swamps down to Cairo.
And it went to General Abdullah Manu, who was one of the generals in charge of the forces now with Napoleon being gone.
And Manu immediately seized it as his personal property, but words spread like wildfire.
It was set up on exhibit and thousands of French soldiers, especially the officers who were often by large educated with commissions.
They went and they all came and flocked to see this stone.
And they made lithographs of it, John just paper squeezes and word spread, not only all over Egypt, word got back to France and from France it spread through Europe.
So it stays in Cairo under French, let's say, claims.
And first, let's just reconstruct the political, because the whole thing is very involved in the political geopolitics of Europe at the time.
So it, and then there is a rivalry about whether it's the Frenchman or the Englishman who really is the one who did most of the work in the decoding.
But very shortly thereafter, the English take possession of Egypt and the stone passes over into British hands, correct?
That's correct. By 1801, after the blockade of the Nile, the French were forced to concede Egypt to the Brits.
And the surrender includes envoys and ligates, but a special envoy went to General Menu.
And they, it was like espionage of the times, they knew exactly what he had, because word had gotten out across the channel to the Brits.
They knew this stone was really important.
And so the envoy came and they made their presentation of what would be the results of the negotiations, what would be given to whom, who would keep what.
And so they pressed General Menu.
And this envoy included a Colonel Turner and included a very famous Brit, Sir William Hamilton.
Hamilton had been the Minister, plenty, potentiary for King, the King's, the Georgian Kings, in Naples to the Bourbon court.
And he was a great collector of antiquities. His collection eventually became one of the book collections, one of the Hallmark collections of the British Museum.
So he knew antiquities very well.
And he was part of this entourage.
And they demanded the Rosetta Stone from General Menu, who said, absolutely not, this is my personal property.
They said, oh, you can't keep it.
And we know you have it hidden under your tent, which was true.
And they demanded, and he exclaimed after that, even he had no choice in the matter they forced his hand.
And he said, never has such barbarous exploitation, never has such robbery taken place in history.
And of course, overlooking the fact that he had sort of sequestered it for his own personal collection.
But it went to Britain by ship.
And some of the assessments of people at the time of how important it was, the Brits knew full well how important it was.
For example, if you want me to make some of the statements, Colonel T.H. Turner said that it was the most valuable relic of antiquity.
And he also said, now it's a proud trophy of the arms of Britain and the Society of Antiquaries in London, named it this precious monument.
Thomas Young, who will figure in this story soon, he said a few years later that any fragment that could have been found in Egypt that would attach to this piece, any fragment would be worth its weight in diamonds.
So that just tells you some of the assessment.
Now, of course, someone who's famous as the Yale Archaeologist Michael Coe says that the Rosetta Stone is the most famous piece of rock in the world.
And I think William Hamilton, Colonel Turner, Thomas Young, the Brits, they all agreed this was really valuable, perhaps the most valuable relic.
And the Yale professor said that recently, more recently, no?
Yes, that's only about 19 years ago.
Yeah, it's still the case that the Rosetta Stone is the most important rock.
I believe that that assessment holds today.
Even...
Now why is that? Because it just enabled us to read the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
I mean, couldn't we have done without understanding the Egyptian hieroglyphs?
That's such a good question because it's true that you could say some of this romance could be stripped away.
And it's after all a very mundane inscription on it.
But it set the whole tone.
It was the precedent that has allowed archaeologists, the pigrofers, linguists ever since.
It's a model for translation to go from the known, in this case, the Ptolemaic Greek of the third century BC, early third century, from that Ptolemaic Greek, the known language provided then a transcription for the unknown.
And that model has been followed ever since. That's happened with Cuneiform. It's happened with Maya. It's happened all over the world.
So the reason why it could still be called the most important piece of rock in the world is because it started the whole process.
And without language, without knowing a culture's language in their own words, we're left to only try to interpret the objects themselves.
And some of those objects are eloquent, but many of them are mute.
And in this case, it's not so much, as you mentioned, the content of what is written in the stone, because from what I gather, it's actually just a Ptolemaic giving a tax exemption to the priests.
Because a high priest were important politically for a regime that wasn't quite as you call it tentative, so he needed.
So it's not like the epic of Gilgamesh that is on that tablet.
No, it's important as it means of decoding until then unknown language or indecipherable.
Exactly. It has very little literary value, almost no commercial value, maybe a proper statistic value, but essentially just that.
It establishes that the priests are going to back this king for tax exemptions.
So in the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in three languages, as you mentioned, there's the hieroglyphic.
That is called the Demotic and the Greek.
The story is not by any means solved then, because there's an actually quite protracted, laborious chapter of trying to use the known language in order to conjecture what the unknown language is saying.
Yes.
And you mentioned Thomas Young, who was Thomas Young.
Well, Thomas Young was connected to the Royal Society of Antiquaries.
He had in that sense a capacity.
He was called phenomenon young.
He was a genius from childhood on was taught Latin and Greek, and he grew.
He knew six or seven ancient languages and four or five modern languages fluent in French and certainly some other European languages.
As a physicist, which was his primary training, he worked in optics and light, and he made some refinements to Newton's discoveries.
But one of the things he's known for today, he's very famous for what's called Young's modulus of elasticity and plasticity, sort of a physical characteristic of materials.
So he stumbled upon this not so much by accident because he really was good at linguistics.
But you're absolutely right too, that it took a whole generation before people could begin working this out from essentially 1800,
to talk about 1818.
And Thomas Young now had access to that stone because it was in first what was called Somerset House on the Thames River.
That's where the Admiralty still is today and King's College and the Courtauld Institute of Art.
But it was the House there first, and of course then it was moved to the British Museum.
But Thomas Young had access like no one else and being a linguist and being deductive and being trained in deductive processes.
He began asking some really good questions.
Well, it would be fair to say that having direct access to the stone was not as essential in this case because so many transcriptions or reproductions had been made that the script was readily available to scholars all around the world.
Yes, and of course that's where the French get back involved.
It was in their possession first, and now they only have copies of the impressions.
Well, in fact, I think I'm on the French side usually in all these matters historical between the long feud between the Brits and the French.
But Thomas Young of course, because I've always thought that Jean Paul Young, the young French wonder boys, one who finally had the breakthrough when it came to the Rosetta Stone.
But Thomas Young, we have to give him his fair do, no? Because he...
Yes. What was his contribution to the outcome of that Jean Paul Young is associated with?
No one could ever undermine Champolian's genius and his contributions in this.
The French were right to claim a huge stake in this decoding.
And history may in future generations still give him the lion's share.
But Thomas Young's part cannot be overlooked.
And if we see this as you mentioned sort of a geopolitical feud between the Brits and the French, both of them disparaging each other all too often, competing for many things in the European theater,
The French had discovered the Rosetta Stone, but the Brits took it from them. And you could say in a sense that the French are going to get their payback with Champolian.
If we can't own it, at least we're going to be the ones to solve it.
And to a large degree, Champolian did that.
Young's contribution, though, comes because of his possible mathematical bent.
He was looking at the Rosetta Stone and saw, because he could read the Ptolemaic Greek.
He could probably read it like you and I would read the New York Review of Books.
He could read it with great facility. He could read the Greek.
And he noticed that when he compared the distance, the spaces in the Greek, he recognized, of course, famous Ptolemaic Royal names.
He recognized the name of Ptolemy. He could read that in Greek.
And he also could recognize the name of one of the queens, Cleopatra.
This is not the last Cleopatra, they're so famous.
These are both very famous Greek names of the Egyptian rulers now.
But he looked at the hieroglyphs.
And he noticed something peculiar about the hieroglyphs that there were these sort of oval elliptical enclosures around several of the sets of groups of hieroglyphs.
And he counted out the spaces.
And he looked at the space in the Greek text between the first mention of the name Ptolemy and the first mention of the name Cleopatra.
And they were several lines apart.
And he looked back up in the hieroglyphs and he saw that relatively speaking, if you count the frequency of letters, if you want to call them that, the frequency of characters,
the frequency of the distance between Cleopatra and Ptolemy in the Greek was roughly the same in these hieroglyphs spaces.
So he began to wonder, could those enclosures that we now call Cartusius, could those actually be the names, the role names of Ptolemy in Cleopatra?
And he knew, as anyone would, looking at those names, that they both share Ptolemy and Cleopatra.
And he looked at the sequence of those letters, Ptolemy and the sequence of those letters in Cleopatra, which would be, not necessarily the same, would be L-P-T.
He slightly changed. And he saw that those, he saw similar characters that looked in the same sequence in those Egyptian Cartusius.
And that was his first breakthrough.
And he identified after that the K and the R and the M and so on.
And he built up and he was lucky that at that point, Egyptian had borrowed Greek vowels into itself, because before this, in Middle Egyptian and Old Egyptian, there were no words.
So he was very, Sarah Diplis for him that that was there, because then he could also work out O and E and Y.
This mathematical one-for-one correspondence of the L-P-T or the Ptole and then the K and the R and the M and the Y, he was able to reconstruct them, the Royal names of Ptolemy, Cleopatra and Baronique.
And that was the key. And he set that out and he shared this with other linguists, including Sace in Paris, who at that time had been the professor of this very young teenager, Jean-Fonsqua, Jean-Poleon.
And Sace and Jean-Poleon started corresponding with Thomas Young and asked him for some of these keys that he had been making out.
And being a generous person, Thomas Young, his correspondence, sent his keys. He sent his Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Baronique and other words that he'd solved to Shampolium.
And that's all Shampolium needed. Being a genius, he put the rest together.
Whereas Young had not been able to put the rest together.
This was something that Young was doing only on the side. It was one of his many, many pastimes.
And while linguistics for him was an easy process, it wasn't his first love.
It was just sort of a hobby, but for Shampolium, it was his passion.
Shampolium's older brother, Fisciac Shampolium, Jacques had told him earlier, and his older brother, Shampolium's brother, Fisciac Shampolium, had told him because he knew that his young teenage brother was so obsessed with Egyptian things in Egyptology.
He said, perhaps, brother, your future lies in Egypt. And it was true. Shampolium put it all together.
How old was he when he, and how long did it take him to put it all together?
Not long. We have actually correspondence from Thomas Young that shows that he put his first ideas together in 1818.
And he--
Oh, did Young or Thomas Young did it? In 1818, he set his material together.
And Thomas Young, who's born in 1773, and dies in 1829, Thomas Young is just a little bit, you know, older, a half-generation older than Jean-Fantzwa, who's born in 1790 and dies just a few years later than Young in 1832.
But Young, Shampolium, at this point, is really essentially about 1920 years old when he makes his first breakthrough.
He started at about age 14 or 15, and then by his correspondence dates, we can work out that if in 1818, 1819, Young is corresponding to the Shampolium.
But in by 1822, Jean-Fantzwa, Shampolium, goes before the French Institute, the assembly of French scientists, and he reads, he first constructs a letter to Monsieur Dacier, basically the president of this French body of scholars.
And his brother, Fijia, is the secretary to that body, so that's his entree.
And letter to Monsieur Dacier, 1822, Young Jean-Fantzwa, Shampolium, sets forth all his discoveries.
Pages upon pages upon pages of brilliant deductions, stroke after stroke of lightning genius.
And then he reads it before the assembly, and guess who's there in the audience to hear it.
Thomas Young.
Is he?
Yes.
There was enough time for him to get over across the channel.
So he was there present that day.
And you can just imagine the thunderous applause of the French standing up in ovation for Young Jean-Fantzwa, Shampolium, and you also sort of wonder how did Thomas Young feel about that?
But we have later correspondences that show that Thomas Young sort of shrugged it off.
He was quite a generous guy. There's one statement that perhaps, I don't know if you can locate it, but he's very gracious in the best British style, and wants to give--
Do you have that?
Yes.
It's a letter of Thomas Young to Sir William Gell, another famous Brit, scholar, an antiquarian, a linguist.
And this letter is dated just the year after the discovery and the huge Paris pomp.
And September 18, 23, here's what Thomas Young says to Sir William Gell.
"I have now considered my Egyptian studies as concluded.
I sent it--"
He's speaking of his major phonetic discovery.
"I sent it at that time to Shampolium, and he acknowledged the receipt of it.
To have placed more emphasis on the precise states than I have done would have been to display more parade than the thing required.
Or to have shown too much hostility to Shampolium, to whom I would rather give up something that is my right than take from him anything that ought to be his."
Yes. That's the nobility of that British spirit of the Thomas Young.
Yeah, he's a hero.
He has to be a hero in this regard because you're right to think of him in that audience, to think of himself that he was there.
He was on the path.
He could have done it himself at a more time.
But no, he's cool.
He's cool.
And Shampolium also, later on, just the next year, gives young some of the credit.
Do we have the text there as well?
Yes.
And it's interesting too because Shampolium is not exactly his generous as Thomas Young was.
And, you know, when you look at this, what happens later, what ensues, it's really important for Shampolium.
And Shampolium says this, "I recognize that he, young, was the first to publish some correct ideas about the ancient writings of Egypt, that he also was the first to establish some correct distinctions,
consturing the general nature of these writings, by determining through a substantial comparison of texts, the value of several groups of characters.
I even recognize that he published before me his ideas on the possibility of the existence of several sound signs.
Finally, that most of your young was also the first to try to give a phonetic value to the hieroglyphs making up the two names of Ptolemy."
So it's interesting, he says some, some, some.
And he does conclude.
I mean, technically, that's true, no.
Yes, it's only some.
It is, it is only some.
It may be a major key.
It may be the first breakthrough, but it's by no means the full reconstruction.
And it's phenomenal how accurate Shampolium was here now, essentially, you know, 200 years after the fact.
Many of the major propositions linguistically, syntax, and so on, that Shampolium set forth, without any precedent, still hold true today.
And of course, Shampolium and the French rightfully made a big deal out of this.
That, okay, the Brits have the stone, but we made the bulk of the discovery.
And furthermore, Shampolium, who was very much a Napaelinesse.
He was a, he was someone who was very much a Bonaparteist.
Yeah.
And it may have dinged him a bit later on, but he became one of the major directors of the Louvre and went on, even, you know, for the first time.
Even, you know, for the few years he had left back to Egypt for expeditions.
So he became the lion of Egyptology in the world.
And, uh, young, well, he died in 1829, wasn't much credited then.
And all the fanfare around Shampolium wouldn't really allow that fanfare to come through until now with a little retrospect.
But Patrick, it's also the case that there was a furious rush to decipher among a bunch of people at the same time, no.
And I remember reading a life of Shampolium where he was, he was working furiously because he knew that it's just a matter of time before some intelligent person got there.
So, yes.
It was a race against time.
Are there other people who have not gotten credit that they might have deserved or are there tragic stories of someone who was like just three months away from breaking it in the know?
We may never know the full story, but I'm sure there were some Scandinavians involved.
There were some Germans involved.
There we have some names at time at places who were corresponding.
But on the other hand, a lot of these people kept their material to themselves.
We often know in history now that there's sort of a simultaneous discovery of things that there could be multiple claims.
But really, Shampolium does deserve the lion's share of the credit for making this.
Whether or not he knew he was racing against competitors, he had all the right stuff.
He had all the intellectual and even maybe social and political national reasons and causes to get there first.
So, he really did pull it off.
I should have studied up on this better than I have for our show today, but our hieroglyphs, because it sounds like the method of decoding was that it seems to suggest that the hieroglyph is actually alphabetic language.
But I always thought it's more like idiogrammatic.
It's very complicated. There are idiograms, phonograms, there are rebus images.
No, it's not exactly originally phonetic.
But by the time of the Ptolemies, the Greeks had the deal.
Now, the Egyptians are having over them a culture ruling them the Greeks.
The Greeks.
So, some Alexander the Greeks conquered the Egypt.
So, now the Egyptians have to deal with a bulk of a bureaucracy that is not Greek.
And the Egyptians have been pulling in these Hellenisms now for some time.
There's a huge intellectual ferment going on in Alexandria, sort of the intellectual first cosmopolis of the world.
And so, one of the benefits of moving from a very complicated system, which is a syllabary, which is ideogram, which is phonogram, which is rebus, which is pictographic.
All these very complicated linguistic signifiers and determinants and so on become somewhat simplified.
And it exchanges with Greek, Ptolemaic Greek, some of these ways in which the complexity of Egyptian may be now sublimated under the new alphabet of Greeks, which included vowels.
But you're absolutely right. It's very, very complicated ancient Egyptian.
And today we have to look at a lot of grammars to pull out some of the subtleties and nuances of hieroglyphs.
And another very naive question, if you don't mind, is having now knowing the hieroglyphic language, what did that yield in terms of access?
The way in which Egyptian texts had not been accessible for essentially 1500 years, people were using hieroglyphs in Egypt up until the Roman period.
And then with the fall of the Roman Empire, the gradual demise, nobody, even the cops, nobody had, nobody was using hieroglyphs anymore.
Although some of the words end up, Egyptian words end up in Coptic, and Coptic borrows mostly the Greek alphabet.
But this stuff became the whole history of Egypt, Kings' lists, religious texts, literature, poems, hymns, agricultural texts, medical texts, science texts,
Everything, including thousands of papyrite that have subsequently been discovered in oxyrencus elsewhere, all this material was just completely closed.
We knew really nothing, we had pictures, we had some Egyptian artifacts, we had monuments, even with pictures and Egyptian art and fresh, what we call tomb paintings.
Still, we didn't really understand much about Egypt.
We had this idea, this mysterious, mortuary culture, but we had no idea that they had done immense research on astronomy, the Rind of Papyrus.
They'd done immense research on science, the Ebers, the Harris, but Papyrite.
They had thousands of years of accumulated science, history, agriculture, and so all that was opened up.
I was huge in Colossal.
Really, and for a culture that still may be one of the mother cultures of the whole old world, to not be able to touch that stuff, what do we really know about history? Very little.
Is it conceivable that it would have remained closed to this day? Had the Rosetta Stone not been discovered?
Or would we have found other means of finally making sense of it?
I think that the discovery of the Rosetta Stone certainly accelerated the decoding, and then as I said, setting precedent for others, but had it not been found in 1799, probably within half century or so, something else would have been found.
But something else that was found was known to be important because of the Rosetta Stone, so it's not easy to say that it would have happened as quickly.
I think it's probably fair to say we'd be a good 75 years behind, in other words, it could have taken until modern age of computing to make sense out a lot of these texts, and of course computers are used widely now.
But I think the other part of it is that when archaeologists first started exploring the rest of the ancient Greeks, including Mesopotamia, had they not had the Rosetta Stone to work as a template to move from the known to the unknown to the unknown to the unknown to the unknown, that whole area would have been closed off.
It wasn't just Egyptology that was opened up, it was also a seriology and Sumerology and Babylonian lore, and that has continued to be a process this rippling outward of knowledge by the precedent of the Rosetta Stone.
So if you don't have the Rosetta Stone, you don't have a model, you don't have a precedent.
And I think we'd be really behind knowing a lot about the ancient world.
And we were behind for a long time as it was because our colleague, my colleague, especially in my department, Michel Serr, who's been a guest on the show twice before, although in French, our covers.
I think he points out something very important about, let's say modern Western civilization, having four major currents feeding into it, two of which are primarily text-based, or let's say the word, where the word is the most important medium,
and that would be the Greek heritage and the Hebrew.
So it's a almost textual tradition.
And the two others are back to stone, they kind of embodied their knowledge and wisdom or think in a kind of stone in building.
And that would be the Roman and the Egyptian.
Yes.
Where stone is, the massive materiality of it contains a certain sort of hardness that then endures.
And of course, our colleague Michel Serr thinks that in our own era, and for quite some time, if you said to me, it's really been the Greek Hebrew that has one
out over the Roman Egyptian, and that contemporary technologies, especially as you were mentioning, computer technology, everything that's in the realm of the soft, the lighter, the area is where now it's all sort of happening.
Whereas the ponderous weight of the stony, which is Egyptian, and in many respects also Roman, is kind of far away from that.
And perhaps one reason that the Egyptian river that feeds into, if you want to speak about it, and those metaphors of the four sources of that,
that it took so long for us to have access to this whole body of knowledge that you were referring to.
Whereas Latin, we knew about Latin Greek and Hebrew, the Western had access for that for a much longer period.
Maybe there's a future to our free--
That's fast-reval.
Yes.
The Egyptian--
To their legitimate claims to being one of these utterly astonishingly great and still mysterious civilizations.
Yes.
That actually makes me wonder, too, about when you read Herodotus and others, their admiration for ancient Egypt comes through very strongly that they recognized Egypt was way ahead in so many areas.
And yet, what the Greeks were constantly doing is comparing themselves.
And you look at something you've just maybe think about, the seven wonders of the ancient world.
That's a Greek list compiled by Hellenistic Greeks.
The first two things they put in that list were the great pyramids of Egypt and the hanging gardens of Mesopotamia.
And yet, then the next five are all essentially Greek.
And they want to basically compare themselves favorably.
Well, here's what the ancient world did.
And now here's what we have done.
And they're copying and imitating the monumentality of the much older Egypt and Mesopotamia.
But at the same time, they're the ones who've made the list.
They're writing this down.
Now, the other wonders that you said they're all Greek, the other five?
Greek or sort of Greek-ish.
But these are objects in the world, though.
They're material things.
But one could really say that the wonders of the Greek world would be like Plato's dialogues or the theorems of our communities.
These things that are not incarnate in stone or in, it's not like the pyramids.
No. So their genius was in the area and let's say the abstract if you want.
Egypt, there's a wisdom there that is incarnate in the stone as such.
Yes.
I mean, this is fascinating to think of these legacies because Egypt's legacy today is not Euclid.
It's not Aristotle.
It's ruins.
If you look at Shelley's poem, "Ozomandius," look on my works, E. Mighty, and despair.
That romantic notion of Egypt, what has Egypt contributed today?
Well, without any way denigrating Egypt's magnificent past and its head start and a lot of the sciences,
it's really, you're right.
It's the Greeks and the Hebrew people of the book that have much more of a--
We're much more of a--
That's because we're partial to the book.
We're more of the children of a book culture than we are of the stone or the building or the aqueducts or the Roman roads or the Egyptian pyramids and the tombs and the Sphinx and things of that sort.
And it's not a question of weighing one higher than the other.
It's that they're--
These are different kinds of heritage.
And we have gone so far and I think in the direction of the abstract and the area and the non-grounded that where Keats again to go back to hear lies one whose name was written in water.
I just sometimes worry that we're writing everything in not even in water but in a kind of air and that we need some stone back into the equation.
Some durability and some permanence.
Some kind of durability and permanence because that's also, if you read the beginning of the time-yas,
Credius tells an old-world story to Socrates about that he heard from his grandfather who got it from his grandfather about
Solan, the sage of Greece going to Egypt to the city of Sais.
And there there's a bunch of old Greek--
I'm sorry old Egyptian priests who ask him to tell them the stories of their origins.
And so Solan starts telling the myths that were known to the Greeks at the time about forronius and Dukeleon and Pyre and Neophyph.
Oh, Vlad, yes.
And he gets interrupted by an old Greek priest and he says, "Oh, Solan, you Greeks are nothing but children.
You have no ancient traditions that are horry with age or that go back because you keep losing your memories."
And he goes on to say that the difference between Egypt and Greece is that in Egypt you have the flatness of the Nile, the Delta and the Nile,
and that the floods, he said that there's periodic heavenly declinations or deviations which cause catastrophes in the mountainous terrains of Greece, where you have fire and water, and everything gets drowned and civilizations just kind of washed away in the sea.
And you have to start all over again, you Greeks, over and over like children.
So you don't have any ancient memories, whereas here in Egypt the water comes from below and up above.
And we we weather without rupture.
And so we have a continuum.
And so now let me tell you the story and they goes on to tell the story of Atlantis, which Solan's Greeks have no recollection that their remote ancestors, the Athenians actually saved your Europe from the invasion of the Atlanteans and so forth.
Because the Egyptian memory is far more continuous with the remote pass and that of the kind of more volcanic Greek memory.
So this is a beautiful allegory for what you what you gain and what you lose.
On the one hand you have this youthfulness and this kind of energy and dynamism of no one wants to take anything away from the Greeks and in that regard on the contrary.
On the other you have continuity deep time and you know kind of senile with not senile in the sense of decrepit but the fullness of age.
And going to Egypt is the palpable sense of the age of civilization is it's a wonder.
And that also reminds me too that the Greeks under the Ptolemese began to copy Egyptian kings' lists.
Even today in archaeology and in history we use the Egyptian kings' lists as touchstones to chronologize much of ancient history.
They survived.
And now we have them in Egyptian. So the kings' lists of Egypt were the chronometer for the rest of the world because Greece didn't have them.
Rome didn't have them. Egypt had kings' lists with long, long periods of time thousands of years.
Well I want to thank you for coming on Patrick. We've been speaking with Patrick Hunt from Stanford.
Our colleague here at Stanford and we've been talking about the first chapter.
Only the first chapter of his book, The Ten Discoveries at rewrote history.
And we'll be looking forward to having you back on for another show about some of these other chapters.
In particular, I'm particularly fascinated by a few of them.
Especially the one about the 10,000 warriors and imperial China.
And of course the whole thing about the Aegean Bronze Age and other things like that.
What a pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me come.
It's my pleasure Patrick. So take care for entitled opinions. We'll be with you next week. Bye bye.
[MUSIC]
(upbeat music)