Y
ou mightthink the most daunting
decoding challenges occur when an
enemy makes a message difficult to read
by design. To break ciphers such as Ger
many’s Enigma code in the second world
war requires enormous ingenuity.
So why did the decipherers of Egyp
tian hieroglyphs take hundreds of years
to complete their task? The codemakers
didn’t aim to obscure their writing. But
they had been dead for 2,000 years, and
scholars knew nothing certain of their
language. They faced texts that could be
receipts or prayers and lacked the cultur
al knowledge to guess which. They
weren’t sure where words and sentences
began, or even which way the text ran. At
least the Enigma codebreakers knew they
were looking for something resembling
military orders in German.
Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 in
part because French intellectuals were
awed by the ancient culture that had
produced the pyramids and sought to
conquer it. But they knew little of the
mental life of the Egyptians; hieroglyphs
had been out of use for millennia.
The discovery of a stone during the
renovation of a fort gave them a chance.
Inscribed on the slab was what seemed to
be the same text rendered in three writ
ing systems: Greek, an unfamiliar script
and hieroglyphs.
The scholars studying the Rosetta
Stone were operating with scant in
formation and their accomplishment
will astonish readers. Edward Dolnick’s
new book, “The Writing of the Gods”, is a
short, accessible and highly entertaining
account of the work—primarily that of
Thomas Young and JeanFrançois Cham
pollion—that cracked the code.
The two men were inventive in their
approach to deciphering. Young was a
polymath, positing the wave theory oflight among other achievements. Cham
pollion was obsessed with Egypt: he talked
to himself in Coptic, the liturgical lan
guage of the Egyptian Orthodox church.
The Englishman made the first break
through. European Egyptology had la
boured under a misconception for centu
ries, believing that the Egyptians wrote in
a mystical language of pure ideas, not in
anything as boring as an alphabet. Young
noticed that the name Ptolemy, a Greek
ruler of Egypt, recurred in the Greek text.
He had seen that the Chinese would write
Western names with Chinese characters,
using those that sounded most appropri
ate even if they had an irrelevant meaning.
He guessed that the Egyptians did some
thing similar. Luckily the Egyptians also
put an oval, which the French called a
cartouche, around royal names. Young
worked out glyphs that seemed to corre
late with “Ptolmes”, confirming that hi
eroglyphs did not just convey ideas.
Champollion then took the case for
ward. After the deciphering of a few more
Greek names he turned to Egyptian ones,
particularly “Ramesses” (also known asRamses). Unlike many others in the field,
he believed Coptic, which was replaced
by Arabic as Egypt’s primary language in
the first millennium ad,to be a descen
dant of ancient Egyptian. He guessed
that the latter letters of the word might
have something to do with “mise”, the
Coptic for “birth”, and looked for some
thing similar in the Greek. Once he had
found it, he returned to the hieroglyphs
and found the symbols he was looking
for outside a cartouche. He is said to have
fainted on announcing his break
through: the Egyptians used hieroglyphs
for the sounds of ordinary words too, and
he was on the way to unravelling how.
Much was left to discover. A hiero
glyph could represent a whole word,
syllables or individual sounds. Mysteri
ous characters called determinatives
were unpronounced but elucidated a
word’s meaning in ambiguous situa
tions. The stone’s middle script was a red
herring—it was a kind of simplification
of the hieroglyphs, not a key to under
standing them. Champollion worked out
lots about grammar, though, as a work
for the general reader, “The Writing of
the Gods” skips through it. He left much
unfinished when he died at 41.
As great a mind as Isaac Newton
believed that the Egyptians had figured
out everything that mattered and the
moderns’ task was merely to unveil those
existing truths. Young and Champollion
made it possible to unravel just how
brilliant Egyptian civilisation was. But it
was also strange (the passion for mum
mification extended to ibises, a sacred
bird) and primitive (labourers built the
pyramids without so much as a wheel
barrow). Young’s and Champollion’s
intellectual achievement deserves at
least as much reverence as pyramids,
sphinxes and masks of gold.A new book recounts how the Rosetta Stone was decipheredJohnsonWrite like an Egyptian
94 Books & arts The Economist October 30th 2021
also look ahead from Van Gogh to the sim
ple, repetitive forms of Piet Mondrian or, in
architecture, the geometric concrete of
Rem Koolhaas.
In film the Netherlands’ gift is for docu
mentaries rather than fiction. In television
it is for long interviews and reality pro
grammes, where the Dutch series “Big
Brother” played a pioneering role. One of
the innovators was Theo van Gogh, the art
ist’s greatgrandnephew, a provocative re
alitytvinnovator who was murdered by
an Islamist extremist in 2004. The best
Dutch literature swims in everyday tedium, from “The Evenings” (1947), Gerard
Reve’s novel of queer postwar ennui, to
“The Discomfort of Evening” (2020), Ma
rieke Lucas Rijneveld’s novel of queer mil
lennial ennui. “The Potato Eaters” could
have been used as a cover illustration for
that recent book, which opens with a meal
in a poor Christian farmhouse in Brabant,
about 115 years on.
The painting wound up hanging over
the fireplace of Van Gogh’s brother. Anton
van Rappard, a fellow painter, criticised its
formal deficiencies so harshly that Van
Gogh’s friendship with him never recovered. The next year he moved to France
and discovered the Impressionists, and his
palette exploded into the kaleidoscope fa
miliar from his later work. Though Van
Gogh may not have intended it, that con
trast makes “The Potato Eaters” feel like a
judgment on the cramped moralism of
Dutch society. The refreshing Dutch em
brace of the ordinary goes along with a
sometimes oppressive conformism. The
country’s unofficial slogan is doe normaal:
“don’t be egotistical, act normally”.Yet its
greatest geniuses, including Van Gogh,
have been those who couldn’t.n