80 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
THE CRITICS
booksWHAT THE STONE SAID
How Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered.by joan acocellaI
n 1798, Napoleon, with some four
hundred ships, set sail across the
Mediterranean, bound for Egypt.
He had a practical purpose: he wanted
to kick the English out of the eastern
Mediterranean and block their lucra-
tive trade with India. But he was also
interested in Egypt itself, which his
idol Alexander the Great had conquered
in 332 B.C. By the nineteenth century,
Egypt was no longer the glamorous
prize it had been for Alexander. It was
a backwater, hot, dry, and poor. “In the
villages,” Napoleon said, “they don’t
even have any idea what scissors are.”
Still, from its astonishing ancient mon-
uments—pyramids and obelisks piercing
the clouds—and its strange, beautiful
picture-language, called hieroglyphics,
which everyone admired and no one
could read, people knew that this had
once been a formidable civilization. So
Napoleon brought with him not just
soldiers but some hundred and sixty
so-called savants—scientists, scholars,
and artists, with their compasses and
rulers and pencils and pens—to de-
scribe what they could of this fabled
old realm.
The French, however, were no sooner
launched than the English Navy, under
Horatio Nelson, was on their tail, and
shortly after they landed they were pretty
much routed, at the Battle of the Nile,
in which they lost eleven of their thir-
teen warships. “Victory is not a name
strong enough for such a scene,” Nelson
said. Napoleon moved on to an ill-fated
campaign in Syria and eventually headed
back to France, instructing his army in
Egypt to go on fighting and, in partic-
ular, to fend off British incursions along
the coast. They complied, dispiritedly,
for two more years. So it was that, on a
hot day in July of 1799, a team of labor-
ers, working under a French officer to
rebuild a neglected fort near the port
city of Rosetta—now known as Rashid—
discovered a stone so large that they
could not move it. Under a different of-
ficer, the men might have been told to
maneuver around it somehow. But their
supervisor, Pierre-François Bouchard,
was one of Napoleon’s savants, trained
as a scientist as well as a soldier. When
the dirt had been cleaned off the front
of what is now known as the Rosetta
Stone, he realized that it might be some-
thing of interest.
It was a slab of granodiorite (a cousin
of granite), about four feet tall, two and
a half feet wide, and a foot thick, in-
scribed on its front with three separate
texts. The topmost text, in Egyptian hi-
eroglyphs, was fourteen lines long. (It
was probably about twice that length
originally; the top of the slab had bro-
ken off.) The middle section, thirty-two
lines long, was in some other script,
which nobody recognized. (Called De-
motic, it turned out to be a sort of short-
hand derived, ultimately, from hiero-
glyphs.) But—eureka!—the bottom
section, fifty-three lines long, was in
Ancient Greek, a language that plenty
of Napoleon’s savants had learned in
school. One can only imagine what these
men felt when they saw the third in-
scription, like a familiar face in a room
full of strangers. Furthermore, the Greek
writing explicitly stated that its text was
the same as that of the two preceding
inscriptions. Bouchard surely saw what
that meant: the Greek text, if indeed itmatched the others, would allow them
to translate the hieroglyphs and hence,
eventually, all the other hieroglyphic
texts that people had been puzzling over
for two millennia. The stone was swiftly
carted away, to the tent of Jacques-
François de Menou, a commander of
the French forces.
When, two years later, the French
finally surrendered to the British, they
said that, by the way, they were taking
home the antiquities they had discov-
ered in Egypt—or what they liked—
including the Rosetta Stone. The En-
glish replied that that was most defi-
nitely not going to happen: these things
were spoils of war, and they, the Brit-
ish, had won the war. According to a
witness outside General Menou’s tent,
a great deal of shouting ensued. In the
end, the French were allowed to keep
a number of small things. The British
took the big items, including the Ro-
setta Stone, which was then tenderly
escorted to England and given to King
George III. He, in turn, sent it to the
British Museum.
Museum officials, worried about the
strain that the stone, which weighed
three-quarters of a ton, would inflict on
the floor of their fine old building, put
it in a temporary facility while they had
a new wing erected for it. It went on
public display in 1802. From that time
on, the Rosetta Stone has been the most
prized object in the British Museum,
and the subject of any number of close
studies. Now there is a new one, “The
Writing of the Gods: The Race to De-
code the Rosetta Stone” (Scribner), by
Edward Dolnick, a former science writer
for the Boston Globe and the author of